100th Iowa pheasant season could be among state’s best

As the Lone Ranger’s narrator intoned at the opening of each episode, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

Specifically, let’s go to 1963, to the first pheasant season I can recall, when the Iowa Conservation Commission, in its first formalized August roadside count, recorded its all-time highest statewide index of 78.7 pheasants per 30-mile route, when hunters in Iowa recorded their all-time highest harvest of 1.94 million roosters.

On that long-ago opening day, I and a few teenaged friends walked dogless through undrained fields too wet to farm, overgrown with giant foxtail, cocklebur and horse weed, and flushed too many roosters to count.

We shot a lot of cheap, paper-cartridge shotgun shells and would have bagged our three-bird limits if we’d connected on just half of our easy shots. In those glory days of a rooster next to nearly every fence post, however, we did not fret over misses, knowing that the next opportunity lurked just ahead.

In those days before the widespread adoption of hybrid seeds, herbicides, commercial fertilizer, drainage tile and massive equipment, pheasant cover was ubiquitous. Hay, oats and pasture — all suitable pheasant habitat — occupied much of the 10 million acres now planted to soybeans, in whose stubble a field mouse could not hide.

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Before the perforation of farm fields with drainage tile, wet spots commonly called sloughs grew up to pheasant sheltering weeds.

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Corn was still harvested on the ear by pickers mounted on tractors or pulled behind them. Stalks were shorter, fewer and farther apart and often interspersed with weeds so that a harvested corn field, its stover unpulverized by massive combines, often sheltered pheasants through the fall. And before the removal of fences to accommodate bigger machinery, most fields were surrounded by brushy, weedy fence rows, which may have provided pheasants’ favorite shelter.

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I’ve been blessed to hunt in the golden age of Iowa pheasants, from 1963 to 1981 — 19 consecutive seasons with an estimated harvest topping 1 million roosters. During that era, the statewide roadside count averaged 53.3 birds per route and the estimated harvest averaged 1.38 million roosters. I’ve been further blessed to hunt in the state’s silver era, 1987 to 2000, with an average roadside count of 41.1 and an annual estimated harvest averaging 1.23 million roosters.

Fast forward to the modern era, 2001 to 2025, in which farms became larger, more efficient and more specialized at the expense of pheasant habitat, and roadside counts dwindled to an average 19.5 birds per route and harvest estimates to 419,000 roosters per season.

Even in this era of straitened expectations I have been blessed to hunt with good friends, in vestiges of good cover behind good dogs for a strikingly beautiful and worthy quarry. And as I write this on Wednesday, three days before the centenary jubilee of Iowa pheasant hunting, I am pumped at the prospect of the state’s 100th pheasant season being the best in 20 years, with a statewide average roadside count of 28 birds per route and the potential for Iowa hunters to harvest as many as 700,000 roosters.

Last week, as I walked along a grassy riverbank in downtown Quasqueton, a blur of brown feathers exploded from the water’s edge in the least likely place I ever expected to see a pheasant. A few hours later, in the context of the rosy roadside counts, I related the sighting to friend and hunting companion Brett Clark, a milk hauler who has seen hundreds of pheasants this year as he plies the rural roads of Eastern Iowa.

“I guess they really are everywhere,” Brett said.