Cackle and commotion
I loved pheasant hunting when I was young. I had a pair of cousins who lived in Iowa, and one of them developed the greatest pheasant dog I have ever hunted over, a little Brittany he called ‘Troubles’. In the 1970s and 1980s I traveled to southern Iowa a couple of times every fall and winter to hunt those transplanted Chinese birds, which came up out of the cover before you in an explosion of fuss and feathers, cackle and commotion.
You couldn’t miss one of those big gaudy-colored roosters when they were in range, but quite often you did anyway, and I could never figure out how. My cousins and I had no land to hunt, but there was private farmland where we could ask permission and I found that the later in the season you went, the easier it was to get permission granted, after farm family members had come for Thanksgiving and gone back to the cities.
But in Iowa, you could also hunt road ditches along dirt or gravel roads out in the rural areas, and they were left in heavy cover, often nearly 20 yards wide. In one-mile blocks, you could flush several pheasants from those ditches next to cornfields. You had to let one hunter out on one end, and a couple of hunters with the dog started on the other end, and you worked that cover as quietly as possible. The limit was three roosters per day, and sometimes we could kill a limit just hunting road ditches, after the crops had been harvested.
If you wanted to hunt pheasants, you learned to do it as quietly as possible. Rooster ring-necks would hear you and they would run, flushing well out of range. Seemed like they loved to run a great deal more than they loved to fly. But some would sit really tight in that heavy cover and let you walk past them. I took my Labrador with me because they always ranged close, and he would flush any tight-sitting roosters well within range. Sometimes pointing dogs spent too much time out away from hunters, and pheasants would flush wild, before they could find them and point them. They were one of the most aggravating of game birds, running and flushing a half mile away or sitting so tight you would walk past them. But my cousin’s little Brittany figured them out, and she made successful hunters out of us.
I miss it. The folks in Iowa’s Game and Fish department got greedy, as all bureaucracies seem to do. Licenses and special tags got so high I couldn’t afford them, with a family to raise. They tripled in very little time, and the cost of motels and gas and meals made it so that the out of state hunters who weren’t well off just couldn’t come up to hunt only one weekend and justify the cost.
Now, there are a fraction of the pheasants in southern Iowa there once were. A friend of mine who still hunts often, living in Ankeny, says that pheasants may be lower in number today than they ever have been.
“With the price of corn and soybeans so high,” he told me, “farmers leave nothing, and they would actually plow and plant to the edge of the roads if they could. Draws and grassy plots once there for nesting and escape cover are now in crops, and when they are harvested, there’s a string of huge plows behind turning the ground over, leaving black, barren fields.”
Combine that with more nest-destroying furbearers than ever, more hawks than ever, and more hunters than ever, and you see why pheasant hunting is poor today in southern Iowa. The CRP land, which leaves some acreage out of production, and seemed to be such a good idea for small game, is today so heavily grown over you can’t hunt it, and pheasants can’t move through it, can’t nest in it and can’t find food in it. It makes good escape cover and nothing more. We have had some hard winters too, which wreak havoc on quail and pheasant populations and several landowners I know confirm what my friend says, there aren’t enough birds to hunt, and it keeps getting worse.
I have also been told that Iowa has fewer deer today than anyone can remember for many decades. “Des Moines is the capital for insurance companies in the middle of the country,” he told me. “They put pressure on the state game department to reduce deer numbers because they were paying out so much in deer damage claims to auto owners. So they liberalized things so much that deer have been really hammered, and in places, you can’t hardly find any.”
He says if insurance companies could, they would make whitetail deer extinct in Iowa, and I believe he is right. There are perhaps 10 times more vehicles today than there were 50 years ago, and auto deer collisions therefore rising accordingly. Iowa had bigger bucks than most Midwestern states because of the nutrient factor, and so much cropland to feed them. Occasionally someone would kill a 400-pound deer in Iowa, and the antlers were massive, almost as big as some of the antlers being grown on deer farms today. But rifle hunting was forbidden, because of the farmhouses and such flat country. You could only hunt with shotgun slugs or muzzle-loaders. “It doesn’t look good,” my friend says, “more hunters, fewer deer with no sign that anything will change, and the deer numbers seem sure to decline more.” “But,” he says, “We have more raccoons than ever, in case fur prices ever come back.”
It seems I remember when I was a kid seeing giant walking sticks (insects), but I can’t help but be amazed at a population of them in Wright County that are twice the size of normal ones. And they are colorful, red and green mixed in with the brown. You can see a photo of one of them on my website. Also on my website you can get the info about our big outdoorsman’s swap meet on Oct. 22. This year, if you want to set up a table and sell fishing and hunting gear, or anything else, you have to do it before Sept. 30.
Sondra Matlock Gray, the editor of my magazine, the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Journal and the lady who I wrote about last week getting a fishing lure hung up in the seat of her pants and her hand at the same time, will be with me Friday and Saturday afternoon at the Stockton Walnut Festival, where we will give away a bunch of our magazines and a free crappie fishing trip next spring (by drawing). Details of all that are also found on the website, www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com
If you have nothing better to do you should come to that festival and see us. But of course, if you have a chance to go hunting or fishing, it would be wise to do that too. It won’t be long ‘til we go right out of summer into winter, most likely bypassing fall all together.
Call my executive secretary about anything you would like to get more details about. Ms. Wiggins can be reached at 417 777 5227. E-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net and write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.
