It looks like we know the answer! Half of the hens were mowed down in the first alfalfa cutting, this isn't news anywhere else. With new strains of alfalfa, maturing early on and repeatedly, it's a death zone for sitting hens. If you could get farmers to mow with a sickle bar mowers and a side delivery rake, instead of swathers, and disc mowers, or at set aside some nesting "trip" crop to allow some to succeed. We are fighting an uphill battle. On private ground, the state, or federal grounds I don't see why we can't manage the resource to allow successful nesting, at least there. It mightmake an impact to research alfalfa strains, and harvesting techniques which can be implemented elsewhere. Now that would be worth supporting! Taking wild hens which were successful nesters and aclimated to the area, 45 miles to document the technicolor death seems at least counter productive. So imagine the loss in Idaho, and contrast that to North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa. Loss of nesting habitat is alot more crucial than anything else in my opinion. The birds find a swamp, a feedlot, and few farmstead hedgerows, to survive, forage in fields for waste grain and grasshoppers. I thought the idea was habitat, sound like Mud Lake has it, but it's completely mismanaged for pheasants, I would suspect that, they stock 16,000 birds, also a dead bag loser.