In Iowa: Roadside ditches do more than drain

In an era of intensifying agriculture and the consequent displacement of perennial vegetation with row crops, Iowa's 750,000 acres of roadside ditches are becoming an increasingly important component of the state's natural environment.

Properly functioning, well-vegetated roadside ditches serve much more than their primary purpose of draining excess water from the roadway.

Ditch weeds, as some would call them, increase water infiltration, reduce edge-of-field soil erosion, delay runoff after heavy rains and capture drifting snow. They also include many eye-pleasing wildflowers, among them the once-prevalent common milkweed, a plant essential to the survival of the monarch butterfly.

Ditches also provide valuable habitat for wildlife, including the red-winged blackbird, whose territorial claims in roadside ditches herald the arrival of spring, and the ring-necked pheasant, whose colorful, cackling eruptions from cover thrill hunters and wildlife watchers.

My long-standing appreciation of ditches was further elevated earlier this month when my friend Arthur Clark of Quasqueton and I, pheasant hunting companions for more than 50 years, opted for the first time to concentrate our efforts on roadside ditches.

On Dec. 3, with many of our favorite fields occupied by opening day shotgun deer hunters, we took to the ditches, thinking that the hunters' pursuits might force pheasants to flee their traditional haunts and take refuge along nearby roads.

Having endured several grueling and unproductive hunts earlier this season, Arthur and I felt we were owed some easy pheasants, but the thought we might collect on our first ditch hunt never entered our minds.

We could not have found ditches better suited to our purpose. We started on a little-used gravel road that had no houses or farmsteads on a mile-and-a-half stretch. Both ditches had thick growths of cover and lay adjacent - on one side of the road or the other, if not both - to pheasants' favorite food source, a harvested field of corn that had not been subjected to fall tillage.

The ditch contained all the pheasant-preferred vegetation types: rank state fair-quality horseweed for cover from overhead predators; fluffy foxtail and brome for cozy roosting and lounging; dense cattails for snug protection from harsh winter elements; and thick expanses of snake grass, also known as horsetail, a vascular fern among whose pipe-like stems pheasants seem to feel especially secure.

To its further credit, the ditch also contained less than the usual quota of reed canary grass, an invasive species hated by everyone and everything with the notable exception of raccoons, which seem to delight in burrowing beneath it, their scent attracting hunting dogs to confrontations that seldom end happily.

Walking road ditches with Arthur's dog Gunny, we shot our three-bird limits in a little over two hours without breaking a sweat or getting our boots dirty.

Gunny pointed five of our six roosters, which made for some close-range, easy shots, and he let us know the sixth was nearby, so we were fully prepared for each flush.

We could have gotten our limits sooner if we had paid more attention to the dog.

Twice, while congratulating ourselves on the harvest of a bird, we failed to notice until too late that Gunny, never one to stick around for the fist bumps, was hot on the trail of another rooster.

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