doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Ruffed Grouse and Woodcock hunting-MN.

Winter pheasant cover in SW MN, Cattail sloughs, Willow thickets and old farm stead groves. Most of the grass of ANY type is blown full of snow early on. The groves are disappearing fast as they are grubbed out and planted. Brome was OK, there were more than a few Huns when it was more popular. The Huns like the groves too. Haven't shot a Hun in years.
Heading up Nort soon, No Phez at all in western NC!

Chief

I need to try my luck on crows this year too

Larry, I don't find Iowa brome to be better than prairie grasses for birds. Quite the contrary. But I do find it a lot easier to hunt.

I'll be in up to my neck in prairie grasses on Saturday and Sunday.

Meanwhile, I got the all clear to bug out for grouse in Minnesota the following weekend, but when I started looking into it, I think I'll try to go to Nebraska for quail instead. I already have a valid tag for them.

Was the population boom due to the Brome Larry...or do you think the boom just might have been powered by favorable conditions..mild winters, good springs and summers???
Brome does hold birds, no doubt...and brome does hold the soil in place, brome grows fast and it�s hard to kill...but brome is virtually worthless if faced with a hard winter and wet spring. I�ve shot many many roosters out of the brome...mostly early in the season. Rarely ever see birds in it after the snow comes and stays. I hunted Iowa and Nebraska hard in my time spent in the Midwest...harder than most I�d say. A lot of days spent afield (my work schedule allowed/allows me to hunt almost 20 days a month). If a person hunted for 30 years but spent a total of 20 day�s afield during the entire season...I�d have that person beat by a long shot in total days busting through the grass and brush. I�ve spent the time in the field to have pretty good idea of what I�m talking about.

LeFusil, since I lived in Iowa and have chased pheasants here for the last 26 seasons I will throw in my 2 cents and say it was "favorable" conditions, definitely not brome. Birds were plentiful everywhere compared to those same places now. Many of those areas had little brome then and birds living in wetlands and other non-brome habitats were equally in greater abundance as birds in brome-grass dominated landscapes.

In fact, during those years, winters were often brutal compared to what we see now, but springs were better for certain.

Certainly, the overall loss of CRP - especially in the large blocks of it, and conversion of fields of CRP to strip habitat, have hurt a lot but conversion of grasslands of any type from C3 dominance (mostly introduced cool-season grasses) to C4 species (warm-season, tall-grass, native species) has probably been a minor help rather than a hindrance.

It is interesting to note that turkeys over this interval have flourished greatly. Wet spring don't seem to get them down like some other groundnesting birds.

Perhaps the least understood and certainly underappreciated factor may be the general loss of small wildlife in general from agricultural and even non-agricultural landscapes. Many farmers have noticed and commented on the overall reduction of insects of all types. Fewer butterflies, but also fewer bees, beetles etc etc over the last decade or so. Recently, a paper was published in PLOS1 (an academic journal) that as much as 75% of insect life in general has disappeared from Germany in the last 25 yrs. Many of my colleagues (biologists of many stripes) have noticed really pronounced declines in passerine birds among other species at their field sites where they don't necessarily study the birds, but are places where they regularly visit and have reason to notice such trends. Indeed, I no longer see the butterfly or bird migrations on my own rural property that I saw even 15 yrs ago. The exact nature of these changes is hard to pin down. Chemical agriculture is frequently suspected and with good reason, but it is hard to know. Certainly, however, all is not well out there and losses of insects on the scale of what has been described in other places would certainly impact chick rearing by pheasants.

I wonder and doubt if we will ever get back to the boom years of pheasant hunting again. Illinois shows no sign of every returning to a pheasant producing state again. I suspect Iowa is following Illinois lead.

Dustin and Brent, I certainly agree that prairie grass in general is superior to brome. But here's the point, weather aside: CRP gave us in Iowa, virtually overnight, 2 million acres of grass habitat, most of which was brome. That grass replaced 2 million acres of corn and soybeans. And while I also agree that brome is poor winter cover . . . well, take a year like last year, when much of Iowa hardly had winter. I ran my snowblower once, and probably didn't need to that time. And it is decent nesting cover until it becomes matted down, which takes a few years. Because of the 1988 drought, our brome CRP acres didn't really have much of a chance to reach the point that it wasn't good nesting cover until well into the 90's.

As far as how much time I spent hunting, from 1987-96, I averaged 69 pheasants bagged per year without ever leaving Iowa. That included only one year (1988, when I started teaching at Iowa State) when "work" interfered significantly with pheasant hunting. After that, once I adjusted my teaching schedule to compensate for the fact that my colleagues didn't like early morning classes, even though I was working "full time" during pheasant season for the next 4 years, I hunted most afternoons. And while I didn't hunt every day during Iowa's average season of 75 days or so, I almost always hunted more days than I didn't.

I don't doubt that we would have had far greater bird numbers if all those big CRP fields--so many of which we lost after the 96 Farm Bill--had been prairie grass rather than brome. But "pre-winter" conditions often exist in Iowa for the majority of the season. Significant snow seldom comes before December. And when it does, it usually melts--and even the brome fields would recover to the point where they were once again holding good numbers of birds.

Much of my advantage as a pheasant hunter came from the fact that I lived in Poweshiek County from 1985-88 and made a lot of good contacts with farmers. Poweshiek during the early CRP years had an almost perfect mix of CRP and crop fields. 50,000 acres of CRP in a single county. But I hunted other parts of the state as well. And wherever I hunted those big brome fields, I did quite well.

I agree that for various reasons--unless maybe we lose the Renewable Fuels Mandate--it's highly doubtful Iowa will ever see those boom years again. While those big CRP fields were being established, as I drove around the state, I observed a whole lot of "micro-habitat"--fencerows, sloughs, small wetlands--being removed. Bigger and cleaner crop fields. Significantly reduced trapping pressure on nest predators like raccoons. And I thought to myself, God help us if we ever lose CRP. And while we haven't lost it, what we have now = both reduced acres and less valuable in terms of nesting cover, if not winter cover, than what we had in the program's first decade.

All of those factors make it pretty clear that we won't ever see Iowa again as it was when CRP was initially established.

I'd also add that the string of snowier than normal winters and cooler/wetter than normal springs--the very unfortunate "perfect storm" for Iowa pheasants that gave us numbers lower than I thought we'd ever see--occurred in the 21st century, long after the 1996 Farm Bill and the subsequent loss of much of Iowa's "full field" CRP acres.

This has turned into an informative and educational exchange of ideas and being done with civility. Wow...just like the good ole days.

Habitat management can only achieve so much. I spent 14 years and over 100k learning that all the experts were helpful to some degree but mostly guessing. You change one thing and something unexpected was certain to come, with what you hoped would happen, if you were lucky. Mother Nature would do what it wanted to and man can not exceed that level for long and worse they can easily screw it up with almost no effort.

In the end the state game management introduced wild turkeys on my land without telling me. That was the final straw. In two years I went from 15-18 viable coveys to one. I did not even associate the rapid die off of quail to the infestation of turkeys until the saw it repeated two years later on another farm I own. I had three coveys every year and sometimes five or six. Two years after the state introduced turkeys on the farm across the road I had multiple turkeys in three sections of woods and zero quail. The state biologist assured me that turkeys and quail easily coexisted. BS in my experience.

I'd love to see long term increases in game population but have concluded that it's in Gods hands not mans.

I'm going to guess you missed the first version of the board. People could and did post withoout using their names.

The dung storms were many.

Nobody will ever convince me that pheasants in MN can get by without a little assistance in the form of carryover food plots across winter, and leaving a bit of woody brushland. Regardless of how wonderful the grass plantings are, or, how well it worked in Iowa or Nebraska.


Best,
Ted

ky: it has been my experience over the last thirty years, that turkey infestation results in a decrease in grouse and pheasant propagation...

state wildlife managers refuse to admit their error of introducing the predatory wild turkey into habitat occupied by other game bird species...