Ted, bluestem useless to pheasants in January? Well, my experience hunting Kansas, Nebraska, & Iowa for 18 plus years would say otherwise. Especially if that bluegrass borders a cut corn or milo field. Now a pretty much worthless grass for wildlife that seems to be in many CRP seed mixtures...brome.
Dustin, if you had experience longer than 18 years hunting CRP in Iowa, you would not refer to brome as "worthless". When CRP began in 1985, brome was mostly what was planted on our 2 million acres enrolled in the program. The pheasant harvest increased from 724,000 in 1984 (then an all-time low in Iowa) to over 1.4 million in 1987, mainly as a result of all those big grass fields. I'll readily admit that native prairie grasses in general are superior, but relatively few farmers were planting them then. Brome provides decent nesting cover (although it's not much for winter cover if there's more than a few inches of snow), although it needs to be managed--burned, cut, disked, whatever every few years--or it becomes matted underneath and of much less value. But we had a severe drought in Iowa in 1988, with virtually all the CRP fields cut for hay or grazed. The following year, the habitat was great.
We didn't start seeing a lot of native prairie grass until the CRP rules changed under the 96 Farm Bill and its use was emphasized. Unfortunately, for various reasons (mainly higher CRP rental rates in Iowa), those rules caused us to lose the majority of our "full field" CRP enrollment. Stream buffers planted in prairie grass replaced a lot of the lost acres, but they are of less value either for nesting or winter habitat--they can become "predator corridors"--than the big fields.
I guided nonresident pheasant hunters in Iowa from 1994-97. I stopped mainly because virtually all my big CRP fields, where my pointing dogs could produce well for the hunters, became soybean fields overnight. In terms of the number of pheasants produced, I'd trade all of Iowa's CRP prairie grass buffer strips for an equal acreage of full fields of properly managed brome in a heartbeat.
