My son and I have been hunting birds together since the early 1990's, in North Central Indiana where I live, when he was younger and now still in Indiana but also in Illinois, Iowa and South Dakota. The hunting out west can be wonderful if you know where to go. When there was a lot of CRP in the 90's we shot ducks, pheasants and quail here in Indiana within15 minutes of home; now, we can do that with ducks but there's little upland cover for pheasants and quail. We've been drawn for the Gamebird Habitat Stamp hunts at least 6 times since then. I've noticed there are significant differences in the covers on the farms we've been drawn to hunt. Some have good numbers of birds, some not so much. Early on, there seemed to be lots of pheasants on the Benton and Newton County farms we were drawn for, and we usually took 3 hunters, with all limiting out (2 birds/hunter in Indiana). It seemed the DNR took pains to really manage the cover on those farms for optimum habitat, with plenty of food plots and heavy grasses to get the birds through the winter. But we hunted a Habitat Stamp farm this fall, just east of Fowler, IN with 2 good dogs, where despite a rather large acreage provided, little management had been done in terms of food plots and the surrounding acreage was not all in row crops; seemed to us like nearby food was lacking. We saw only 3 pheasants, 2 roosters and one hen on over 200 acres, and only one shot presented itself. We did get that bird, but were disappointed overall at the lack of birds.
