doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Them Black Hills of South Dakota??

treblig1958,

Do you remember when you could put up flocks of pheasants in Pennsylvania? Too bad our game commissions' mismanagement turned them into an endangered species.

Thanks again guys for the great information. It looks like I'll just visit the Black Hills for some sight seeing and hunt around the areas of Mitchell or Chamberlain. Had a great time last year and the people I met there were great !!

Keith, I hear you Brother loud and clear!
Pennsylvania has lost a lot over the decades we've been hunting and now we have to drive a thousand miles to see the birds in numbers we use to see in our own back yards.

Question about PA pheasants: Does the state own enough of the right kind of land, which they could properly manage for pheasant habitat, to have a significant impact on bird numbers? I lived in Iowa most of my life, and the fortunes of our pheasant population do not depend, for the most part, on what the state does or does not do. Rather, they depend on things like the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which created about 2 million acres of great habitat back in the mid-80's--as a result of which our bird numbers about doubled. Lately, weather has been unusually unfriendly, and numbers have fallen off drastically.

Larry, east of the Susquehanna River was the main stay for PA pheasant populations as the state flattens out, relatively speaking, creating a better habitat. I hate to get into the reason or reasons their populations have declined as there are many differing opinions and heated debates concerning same.

I guess Larry it’s sufficient to say and to repeat what many of us have heard way too many times here in PA, especially during the time when the mills were all closing, “They’re gone boys and they ain’t coming back.”

The pheasant heyday in Pa. was in the late 60's to mid 70's. The eastern part as stated was the best. In the area near Allentown, near Copley, Ironton, Nazareth, you could hunt all day and find birds. Naturally it was more hens than cocks, but the dogs had a great time finding them.
There was a lot of open land, naturally asking permission, with a lot of hedgerows, alfalfa fields, cut corn, and a lot of soybeans. The only time the farmers didn't want the dogs in the soybean was near harvest, and they would post signs to keep dogs out. The state had a program back then to stock 5-6 week old birds, by the time the season came they were wild. The other big thing back then was that fox fur brought some money and so stopped some predation.
In my opinion, it all went down hill when the state mandated that all new wardens had to be college graduates (more money out of bird progagation), no more July-August young bird stockings, fur prices fell, etc.
Some of these same areas had the same cover and food, but now there were no birds.
I had replied back to a post a while back about Pa. being the pheasant capital of the U.S., I believe in 1970 or 71, with over a million birds harvested. South Dakota had a very bad year with a lot of spring rains, and was maybe 3 or 4 in the runnings.
The only way to find pheasants now is to buy them to hunt. The state stocking program for the entire state is less than 150,000 I believe.
What a shame, the state is nmore interested in big game and doesn't care about pheasants.