doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com The validity of population estimates.....

Actually, we were pretty close up in Buffalo Co. WI on some old family farmland on the BIL's side, grouse and whitetail woods. We decided to see if the ducks would cooperate in the Tiffany Wildlife area after lunch at the greasy spoon. The cheeseburger was better than the exercise, but in fairness it was a warm bluebird afternoon, and the bar keep did steer us towards a couple of ponds that were wadeable. It came to mind because that's a wildlife area that touts all sorts of success with endangered odds and ends, but I would've preferred a duck or two.

Lek counts for prairie grouse and drumming counts for ruffs only tell you how well adult birds survived the winter. As upland hunters, we basically live off birds of the year. A bad nesting season and poor reproduction trumps everything. Roadside counts done on pheasants, quail, etc in late summer tend to be more accurate because they give a good clue as to whether it was a good or poor nesting season.

No matter which upland birds you hunt, if you're killing more adults than you are birds of the year early in the season, you're very unlikely to have even an average year--let alone an outstanding one. Quite easy to tell with pheasants. And if I'm not seeing a lot of young birds in the bag early, then I'm guessing things will be pretty grim come late season.

Lloyd3, I am dismayed by your cynicism but not too surprised. What you may do to satisfactorily answer your own question would simply be to correlate harvest rates with drumming counts over a long period of time. I suspect there is a relationship that is notable.

Drumming counts are easy to do, and other estimates are simply ridiculously labor intensive and therefore expensive. Grouse don't lend themselves to roadside counts quite like pheasants and even pheasant counts are pretty suspect for many reasons. In fact, I am certainly hoping that this year's counts are particularly inaccurate at predicting bag rates. On Saturday, we will find out.

At any rate, if drumming counts are pretty low in the spring, suggesting low numbers of adults, then one must expect smaller numbers of birds in the fall. Large counts can't guarantee large numbers of birds but at least there is a reasonable chance. I don't think Minnesota wildlife biologists are scamming you for your travel dollars - no meaningful amount of it will fall into their pockets anyway.

Brent, did you see the change the Iowa DNR made in this year's counts? They revised them based on the fact that weather conditions (mostly insufficient dew to bring the birds out on the roads, IIRC) were less than ideal for the counts.

I can only recall one year in which the August roadside counts have been very far off the mark. That was 1993, a year of very serious summer floods. The prediction was that bird numbers were down. What happened was that many hens had renested as a result of the weather and chicks were apparently still young enough that they weren't venturing out on the roads. I hunted in a number of different parts of Iowa that year and had the best season I've ever had. But early on, I shot a lot of really young roosters.

The big days of CRP are definitely gone. Those were the heydays for sure. As important at the total acreage was, the arrangement of those acres in big blocks made them very productive. The linear strips of habitat that we have in current CRP and similar programs for riparian soil conservation and water quality improvement are simply too easy for predators to hunt and could even be a liability rather than an asset for pheasants.

I'll have to look back at the count again and see if they are adjusted or not. My sense of it when I was reading them was that they were not adjusted and I was wondering why since it was very clear that dew conditions were very poor for counting purposes. What I recall was 30-50% reductions across the whole state more or less.

I wish I kept better track of these things in a journal, but I was having some of my best years hunting during some of Iowa's worst years for pheasants. This was primarily because I had access to a couple of prime pieces of property and literally never saw another hunter. My dogs and I owned the world, or so it seemed then, and shot limits more often than not, though I hunted only about once or twice a week on average (as continues through today). While bird populations were low, they were also concentrated late in the year to places I could go and no one else did. It was a good time. Now I'll have to compete.

Back in the 90s we hunted cattails on the ice to the west and the north. Those were rough, tough hunts that wore me, a postdoc and our dogs down to nubs every time. But we mixed those hunts in with hunts to the south and southeast where the rolling brome CRP was very productive and I always looked on those hunts as walks in the park compared to the frozen cattails buried in snow, and just brutal conditions. That made the birds more rewarding however and we got lots and lots of them.

Now I occasionally get to hunt on snowshoes in the late season, though it's been about 2 yrs since that happened. The big marshes, even if they have water in them rarely freeze hard enough. But maybe this year will be a good one to return to the cattails again. I've got the best dog I've ever had and he is ideally suited to the cattails. Me, not so much

They definitely revised the counts. They're now saying basically no change from last year.

Having access to property with good habitat is really critical in down years. Not long ago, a guy I know said "you were lucky to shoot all those pheasants because Iowa was regularly harvesting a million plus birds a year back then". That's certainly true from 1987-96 (when I also happened to own the best pheasant dog I ever had): only one year below a million, and just barely. And Iowa topped SD in the nation's "pheasant championship" 7 out of those 10 years. But in 2001, when we set a then record low harvest of 470,000 birds--about a third of what we averaged during the 90's--I shot 60 birds, 33 of them within 5 miles of my house. We weren't supposed to be that good of an area, but the poor forecast resulted in reduced hunting pressures, and my spots close to home were OK. All but one of them basically stream buffers. And while I didn't have exclusive hunting rights, there wasn't a lot of pressure on any of those farms. (Even started that season a week late because I was out of the country.) But although I lived in Hardin County back then, I also shot birds in SE and SW Iowa, as well as in Marshall and Poweshiek Counties. But didn't travel as much that year as usual, because the hunting held up so well around home. Good luck in a poor year.

BrentD: I don't have any animus towards the Minnesota wildlife biologists. Their job is clearly challenging on many fronts and I am grateful for what they do and.... thankful for any insight that they can provide me as I pursue my own interests. My beef is with the folks at a much higher paygrade who proselytize about things that they either clearly don't understand or really don't care about. What occurred here might purely be the accidental circumstances of an inefficient bureaucracy (and which ones aren't?) but... I suspect that politics played a significant role here, and as usual, it was fueled by moneyed interests. And to clarify that, I'm not talking about deep and sinister forces here, more likely just the usual "wink, wink, nod, nod" sort of stuff that goes on anytime human weaknesses are involved.

In the end, the credibility of everybody involved is damaged. I will be far-more suspicious of the data produced by these folks going forward.

Brent: Good comments about spring counts. Applies pretty much across the board, not just drumming counts. Also counts of singing male woodcock, lek counts on prairie grouse, pheasant crowing counts, etc. High numbers reinforce expectations of a good season. SD had the highest lek counts ever of both chickens and sharpies a couple years back, but a very poor season. Unusually hot and dry weather right when the chicks needed insects--and there weren't any.

Down in TX and OK, they can have pretty average numbers of quail going into the nesting season. But if they get rain at the right time and the result is plentiful food for the birds, they'll double or even triple brood and produce a real population explosion. One reason quail numbers are real "boom or bust" in semi-arid parts of the country.