Pheasants affected by many changes over the years

Having now hunted for many more years than the average hunter, there are some things that I have noticed and observed over those years. Like our duck hunting is better now that when I was in college. The deer hunting is better than when I when I was kid, but not as good as in the 1990s. The grouse hunting now is terrible compared to when I was kid, in college, and in the ‘90s. In just two decades things changed. A little brown bird that everyone and everything likes eating — we all took for granted, they just don’t exist like they once did.

Things change. Conservation efforts, movements, and knowledge changes over just a couple of decades. For several reasons, some are good and some not so good. At one time, it looked like hunting of wild pheasants might become a thing of the past except for a few fortunate states. But just a hundred years earlier pheasants didn’t even exist in the United States.

So we changed some things. This unexpected event came from a farm bill out of the necessity to create a rescue program for farmers with overproduction of certain crops and a depleting soil banks in some areas. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was created. An unintended result was a boom for wildlife.

Over the course of a year’s time, millions of acres of grassland habitat was restored across the Midwestern cornproducing states. And, among other things, a bumper crop of pheasants sprouted in states that just a couple years prior had a lot of corn and not so much wildlife.

Deer, turkey, small animals, and birds benefitted unbelievably. Wild pheasant hunting — fabulous pheasant hunting — was just a long morning’s drive away, a day trip or an easy extended weekend trip.

But that ended when the corn prices came up a bit and producers wanted to put the land back into production.

The number of CRP acres fell dramatically. And the once plentiful pheasant population in Iowa fell with it. What remained were cautiously guarded by the landowners who wanted what was left to hunt for themselves and friends and family. “Outof- staters” didn’t meet those requirements.

As hunters moved farther west — back to weeklong trips in the Dakotas, Kansas, Nebraska and Montana — biologists and conservation organizations sought to fix the problem. Research gathered over the previous 10 years created more studies. While this was going, on the push was to save as much grassland as possible. Then it was a couple of other programs, and then it moved to creating the grassland species needed to conserve pollinators whose numbers were falling dramatically. Now the push in some areas is taking all the information, re-learned and proven over the last several decades, and roll that into what is known as margins. Roadsides, mediums, empty lots, etc. Around here the roadside part is all fine and good, but our ditches are steep. Too steep and narrow to easily cultivate with modern cultivation equipment. And we have these four legged things known as deer. Car-deer collisions are a major reason why the public doesn’t support not mowing until Aug. 1. What can be easily mowed in most ditches is a few feet on the steep roadside of the ditch. I said steep, because for most ground nesting birds they would need mountaineering equipment to build and then to incubate eggs in a nest on that side of the ditch.

And the bottom floods several times per year. Most of our township ditches are not suitable for increasing grassland nesting habitat. A few places they are, but very few. Then again, the conservationists aren’t really talking about North Central Wisconsin.

Conservationists and wildlife organizations are talking about what can be done about certain game species in our area and north. Disseminating information about the newest knowledge takes time and it takes open minds to receive. I’m old enough to recall that after 20 years of educating hunters that harvesting does was not a bad thing, some “old timers” still would emphatically rant against hunting does and still would only shoot spike bucks – the dumbest deer in the woods.

And, speaking of changes, last week we heard of changes coming for a lot of hunters reading this, unexpected and most certainly coming this fall. Not everyone will be happy, a few will be, and as hunters we will just have to negotiate another change.

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CHUCK K OLAR LOCAL O UTDOORSMAN