You mean Holland, IA??
Plenty of apocalyptic ideas out there, touting the end of pheasant hunting as we know it, at least for several years. The thing is, given even a terrible local die-off, they rebound quickly (year or two), given habitat & halfway decent weather.
That's why South Dakota stopped doing road side counts. A lot of nonresident hunters would only go there when the counts looked good. Now, they market the state as having world class hunting whether it does or not. They can't relay bad news if they don't have it lol
Nor can they relay good news. Last year numbers were up some, & I wouldn't be surprised if they were up again this year in the areas I hunt, even with the seemingly devastating winter. I think it's safe to say that SD has had world class pheasant hunting almost every year since about 1930, & will continue to, as long as there's habitat.
Really the drought is only in about a quarter of the state. Sometimes you have to drive to hunt a different area than your traditional stomping grounds.
And so will North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, etc
LOL. None of them are world class. Iowas the only state even in the same relm as SD & still only 1/3 to 1/2 as many roodies shot. Maybe Kansas but I hear its really bad of recent. Them other states never even come close. 20%? 25%? I know. I hunt MN public when I can't go home to SD. Not world class. Crap class.
Those other states still do road side counts though. So there's actual data to represent it.
SD does county & state harvest estimates that way better at representing hunting opportunity then sketchy roadside counts. Roadside counts don't put birds in a guys vest, bird numbers do. And being pissed about the license SD sells don't make Nebraska or North Dakota world class.
Those numbers aren't available until after the season though. Roadside counts are an estimate done before the season.
I tracked SD roadside counts for years, comparing them to other scientific data & to my own experience. They were at best an indicator of long-term trends. Their big swings from one year to the next rarely corresponded to what I actually saw in the field. Nor did they regularly correspond to a harvest estimate in an area. While crops tend to change frequently from year to year, potentially altering HOW to hunt an area, habitat is usually more consistent. Consequently, bird numbers in an area with decent habitat are usually fairly similar to years past (with anomaly exceptions). So I feel a previous year's (or several years) harvest estimate is almost always a better predictor for an area than a roadside count.
