Pheasant season: Not as bad as you think

As usual, while we waited for pheasant season to open Saturday, we deliberated over the number of shells a prudent hunter should carry.

Conscious of the state's record low pheasant population, we acknowledged that hunters would not want to unduly burden themselves with superfluous ammunition.

But also as usual, when 8 a.m. finally arrived, we left the truck with pockets bulging - just for old times' sake and just in case.

We could have traveled a little lighter.

On Saturday the four of us - Arthur Clark, Terry Franck, Tyler Franck and I, all of Quasqueton - expended 20 shells to harvest six roosters on state ground in north-central Iowa. That's not to say we missed 14 roosters, though a couple of wily birds did outwit us. It merely reflects that it is a rare flushing rooster that gets shot at by a single member of the party.

On Sunday a nearly identical crew with Nick Wilgenbusch substituting for Tyler expended a similar amount of ammo to harvest three roosters and two gobblers in the familiar fields around home.

In better pheasant years, Nick, the embodiment of preparedness, has been known to carry the sum total of our weekend fusillade, 40 rounds, himself.

We did better than we expected and better than we did a year earlier when August roadside counts indicated what should have been a slightly larger pheasant population than this year's.

Though we had lulls in the action, the dogs' memory of their last whiff of pheasant scent and their anticipation of the next kept Buck, Faith and Gus bulling through heavy cover on both days, despite excessively dry vegetation making their job more difficult than it might otherwise have been.

With the state's corn harvest virtually complete, the pheasants were forced into the heavy cover through which our dragnet progressed.

The excellent cover we hunted could have supported many more birds, suggesting that ill weather trumps habitat loss as the principal cause of the crash of Iowa's pheasant stocks.

For the first time in the decades that we've hunted together, this opening weekend was a test of how much time and effort we will devote this year to our favorite pastime.

Though we will likely spend less time afield than in many other pheasant seasons, the birds were not so scarce as to invoke the first immutable law of pheasant hunting - that when the dogs don't have fun, no one has fun.

A marketing slogan we devised at the end of an earlier opening day for Milwaukee's Best light beer seems apt for the current pheasant season: not as bad as you think.