Upland hunters ATTN

I’m from north central and have been hiking on conservation areas and private ground since September 1st. Have not seen any pheasants and have walked up 2 coveys of quail so far, will continue to be out walking and will update again next week.
 
i formally requested the roadside counts from mdc this year just to see if there was somewhere i could go try to find a few birds. looks pretty dismal to me. of course a roadside count (used to be a rural mail carrier route) is not exact science, and i think they are trying to start a new whistle count program for better accuracy, but the bottom line is we have 114 counties, with 141 routes. pheasant where counted in 3 counties. quail in 33 counties. i heard that a quail restoration area called Bee Ridge has put together a continuous edge strip with cooperating landowners, that supposedly is the answer to bringing back quail. i need to read up on the particulars. i think that all these small acreages going into the pollinator program is going to do some good around here. we'll see
 
thanks jpace, i can't ever find anything on their website, it tends to change alot, so i do a formal information request for the raw data. if you look at the mdc breakdown by zoogeographical regions everything looks fair. when you put the actual quail counts on the missouri county map, it looks close to pitiful. i have lived most of my life in the western prairie region. if you look at the graphs (page7), you will notice that the western prairie used to have 40 plus quail on the count. they even changed the graph parameters for the western prairie to show the higher numbers for this region only. we had great quail numbers until 1994, then they nosedived. by 2000 they were basically gone. the graph keeps bumping along at zero ever since. i guess our habitat just hit a wall, and no can no longer handle a quail population. i really envy you guys that do have the quail.
 
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