Pheasant season opens quietly

The opening day of pheasant season, a big, noisy, colorful deal for most of my life, will pass virtually unnoticed Saturday in much of the state.

Discouraged by steadily declining pheasant numbers, most hunters will have found something more productive to do than coaxing listless dogs through birdless fields while lugging 7 pounds of useless steel.

My buddies and I, however, intend to spend the day verifying the accuracy of annual roadside counts that point to a third straight record low ringneck harvest.

The statewide roadside index, a record-low 11 birds per 30-mile route, portends a harvest of between 150,000 and 200,000 roosters, according to Todd Bogenschutz, the upland game biologist for the Department of Natural Resources.

That would be a season bag of about three roosters apiece for the 60,000 hunters expected to pursue Iowa pheasants this year - just 20 percent of the orange-clad army that turned out for opening day in the 1970s when harvests averaged 1.5 million roosters and Iowa was the pheasant capital of the world.

Someone miraculously transported 35 years forward from the mid-70s would be hard-pressed to believe that gradual climate and farming changes could so rapidly rid the landscape of a bird that seemed so well suited to its environment.

But the gradual supplanting of grassland, hay, pasture and small grains by corn and soybeans, coupled with a continuing trend toward cold, snowy winters and cool, damp springs, has reduced pheasant populations to precarious remnants in many Iowa counties.

In northeast Iowa, the nine-county region where I live and hunt, the roadside index topped 80 three times between 1977 and 1981. Last year it was 2.6 and this year it is an even 5.

Last year, six friends and I, aided by three excellent and three decent dogs, bagged a combined total of two roosters opening day. This Saturday, a somewhat smaller party will hunt the same fields with the hope, though perhaps not the reasonable expectation, to do as well.

People say, “Orlan, why don't you quit hunting them? Do you want to be remembered as the guy who shot the last pheasant in Buchanan County?”

Of course I do not, and I would quit hunting them if I believed that my shooting a rooster would affect the species' ability to rebound in the event that favorable weather ever returns to the state.

But, barring evidence to the contrary, it would take more than one opening day shutout to make me sit out a day that has meant more to me than all the holidays combined.