King, I respected the late Ed Muderlak's contributions here and bought his book on the Parker shotguns, even tough I am not a Parker person, but I bought it anyway.
The reason for my beef with him was that a while back someone posted about how the pheasant population has declined and that South Dakota always held it's own. The measured success as one million pheasants harvested in the season. I posted back that in the early 70's, Pennsylvania killed over a million pheasants and was more than South Dakota and a few other states as well. It made the Top 10 in pheasant harvest.
Now I knew this as a fact, and Ed stepped in with his first post and told me basically I was full of crap. Well that started it and I posted back and told him that his state didn't even come close and I guess that raised some hair on his neck and he went on and on.
I finally posted a link to what I had said, never posted again about it or made any kind of apology, didn't think he would admit to not knowing something.
He rubbed me the wrong way with his smart-assed remarks, and I told him to stick with what he supposedly knew. Also at the time I was looking at another book by him, but I refused to buy it just on gp.
JDW, you were correct about the PA pheasant harvest. I wrote my first outdoor article back in 1977. By 78-79, I was "Iowa editor" of the old Fins & Feathers magazine. One issue, in my column, I ran a little quiz: "Name the two states that recorded a million bird plus pheasant harvest last season. Hint: South Dakota is not one of them." The correct answer was IA and PA. Starting in 1963, the IA pheasant harvest never dropped below a million until 1982, then wobbled a bit for a few years before recovering in 1987, with the establishment of CRP. SD's last million plus year was 1974, with their harvest remaining below a million for the next 5 years.
