Shaun Rydl parked his SUV at the top of a grassy ridge, got out and looked around. In every direction, he saw tall switchgrass, brushy draws and knee-high brome. A combine groaned in the distance, churning through the tail end of the corn harvest.
“Welcome to paradise,” he said.
For a pheasant–or a pheasant hunter–Rydl could be right. After the most dismal year on record, Iowa’s pheasant population has rebounded, and hunters are the winners.
Over four days in early November, Rydl played host to an invasion of out-of-state visitors: Steve Parker of Appleton, Wis.; Kevin Burney of Neosho, Wis.; Patricia Winter, also of Neosho; and myself, showing us some of the best bird hunting any of us could remember.
“I don’t like to predict anything,” Burney said as we set out from his home before dawn. “But if what Shaun is telling me is true, this could be spectacular.”
It was. On the first afternoon, I filled a three-bird limit in an hour, even while passing up a few shots and missing another. I thought my record was safe until Burney took three gaudy roosters in 37 minutes on the morning we were to go home.
Each day we saw more birds than we would have in a season’s worth of walking the fields near home, but bagging our limits wasn’t always so easy as it was that first afternoon. Much of the corn was still standing two weeks after the Oct. 26 opening day, and the crops provided perfect escape routes for skulking roosters.
“This standing corn is killing me,” Rydl moaned one day after watching bird after bird flap into neighboring cornfields.
But when we hunted a farm where the harvest had been completed, we hit the jackpot. I recall roaring in frustration one day as I tried to reload my shotgun with pheasants erupting from thigh-high grass all around me.
Remarkably, we were hunting in what state biologists consider Iowa’s poorest pheasant region, the southwest. The northern two-thirds of the state has much higher bird populations.
Iowa’s 2001 pheasant harvest was the worst in nearly 40 years of record-keeping: 470,000 roosters taken, down from slightly more than 1 million the year before and well below the 10-year average of 1.2 million a year. A particularly nasty winter with deep snow and bitter cold was the culprit.
But last year’s winter was one of the mildest in memory, and wildlife populations exploded. The annual August roadside survey found pheasant populations up by nearly 120 percent statewide, leading biologists to predict that as many as 860,000 pheasants would be taken this fall. Another mild winter and warm, dry nesting conditions in the spring could push next year’s harvest back above 1 million.
“With the brood stock we have, and if we just have another phenomenal winter and spring, I see [pheasant populations] increasing by 50 percent again,” said Todd Bogenschutz, upland game biologist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.
Low bird numbers keep hunters at home. About 40,000 out-of-state hunters chase Iowa’s pheasants in an average year, but last year’s woeful hunting forecast kept them away in droves.
Resident hunters took a pass, too–license sales dropped by 27 percent overall.
That has a huge effect on rural communities. In a good year, resident and non-resident hunters directly pour an estimated $85 million into the Iowa economy, not counting license sales.
Our group set up headquarters in Adair, a town of about 850 right off Interstate Highway 80, best known as the site of the first train robbery west of the Mississippi River, by Jesse James on July 21, 1873.
We passed a historical marker commemorating that event one day on our way to the fields, following Rydl and his trailer full of crack English setters. We started every day soon after the earliest legal time, 8 a.m., and hunted until the end of legal shooting hours at 4:30 p.m., stopping only for hasty lunches of cheese, crackers and sausage.
We came home with plenty of pheasants to eat and memories to savor.
I won’t forget watching 50 or more hens and roosters boiling out of the end of a draw, giving us the pheasant version of the Bronx cheer as Parker, Burney and I stood slack-jawed in amazement.
But I remember the sundown roosters best.
At the end of the third day, Burney and I sat on the tailgate of his truck, the shotguns stowed, the pointers softly snoring in their kennel. We had slogged along for hours and had seen only a few birds, most winging away well out of range. A cold beer and a hot shower lay ahead.
And then, with a raucous cackle, two roosters flew 15 feet overhead, one swooping into a plum thicket across the road, the other landing at the edge of the corn not 20 yards away.
Neither of us had a limit. Ten minutes of legal shooting time remained, and we had permission to hunt the property. It would have been simple: Load the guns, set loose the dog. The roosters were as good as ours.
Burney and I looked at each other, our eyebrows raised. Then we laughed.
We let them go.
