Will the kansas pheasant population ever bounce back?

W

Waterfowler2001

Member
It seems like over the last 3 seasons everything has gone to crap and I'm worried if the population could ever get back up. The state needs to have at the least harvest of 500,000 birds..because the harvest of 200,000 birds is just awful. If kansas wants more income, they either need to really improve habitat or release more wild birds from other states
 
bounce back

if anyone could really answer this, they are wasting their time on this damn web site. anyway, we all have two cents someplace, me, i say it will get better and a lot better, but the glory days are surely behinds us, budgets, farmer greed, green energy, guy's in wash. don't hunt, weather, oil, the list can get longer but the fact is, we as hunters and the birds being just pheasants are up against the wall. if you had a totem pole, you would see where we fit.

cheers
 
I don't know that the glory days are behind us. I am 48 yrs old and have hunted pheasants my entire life. I feel like 2008 was as good as I ever had it. It was really good from 2003-2010.

But will it ever come back, I don't know. Nothing seems to be in the corner of the ringneck.
 
Kind of off topic, but...
How in the heck do they come up with the harvest numbers anyway?
Never once have I reported how many pheasants I've killed. They always ask me about migratory birds when I buy a waterfowl or HIP stamp, but I can't recall ever being asked or surveyed about upland birds.
I wonder the same thing about deer harvest numbers. We don't check in deer in Kansas, but they always seem to have a harvest number at the end of the season.
Maybe they do it like they count waterfowl...."ohhhhhh, I'd say,....bout 100,000". ;)
 
Duckdog17 said:
Kind of off topic, but...
How in the heck do they come up with the harvest numbers anyway?
Never once have I reported how many pheasants I've killed. They always ask me about migratory birds when I buy a waterfowl or HIP stamp, but I can't recall ever being asked or surveyed about upland birds.
I wonder the same thing about deer harvest numbers. We don't check in deer in Kansas, but they always seem to have a harvest number at the end of the season.
Maybe they do it like they count waterfowl...."ohhhhhh, I'd say,....bout 100,000". ;)
Click to expand...

With pheasants and quail, the crystal ball said up from a million! Screw the resource, keep those fees and tourist dollars moving! Missouri did the same thing with Deer and Turkey.
 
Duckdog17 said:
Kind of off topic, but...
How in the heck do they come up with the harvest numbers anyway?
Never once have I reported how many pheasants I've killed. They always ask me about migratory birds when I buy a waterfowl or HIP stamp, but I can't recall ever being asked or surveyed about upland birds.
I wonder the same thing about deer harvest numbers. We don't check in deer in Kansas, but they always seem to have a harvest number at the end of the season.
Maybe they do it like they count waterfowl...."ohhhhhh, I'd say,....bout 100,000". ;)
Click to expand...

I get surveys from KDWPT, probably one or two a year. One season they gave me a log sheet to keep track of all the times I hunted for something or another, and then I was supposed to keep track of all the times I went and the number of birds I got on each trip. I don't know if they do this for pheasants or not...
 
I think the population will bounce back as long as we're not mired in drought.
Back in 2000 the population had declined a little but in 2001 it was really bad. That year though, we had the rains in the spring and it wasn't desert-like in the summer. The following year, we had better birds, and it rebounded even more in 2003.

I've been hunting since I was 11, now 36. Yeah numbers are way down across the state, but I keep hearing stories of pockets of birds here and there, so I keep hoping.

In response to the survey questions, I've received a couple of those over the years. I tried to fill them out to the best of my memory.
 
Kansas harvest numbers are a joke. The determine deer herd numbers by car collisions which is ridiculous. With the any season tag there is absolutely no way they can determine anything. As far as deer go, we must have check stations. For upland, I have never received a survey in my life. I would imagine they someone how use the postal reports.
 
I've seen good years. I've seen bad years. They have a way of following each other. Perfect storms and the stars line up and it will be good again.
 
cheesy said:
I've seen good years. I've seen bad years. They have a way of following each other. Perfect storms and the stars line up and it will be good again.
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Yep, I don't expect this to be permanent. It's been up and down too many times in the limited # of years I've been watching it. My son asked me about this on the opener b/c he remembers being 4 or 5 years old and seeing us come back to the house with limits for 5 or 6 guys at lunch time. He's worried that it'll never be like that again. All I can do is laugh, because he's got a LOT of up/down cycles to witness in his time.

oldandnew talks about commodity prices and how they correlate with land prices (I'm more interested in land prices these days than pheasant #'s). I've taken what he's shared with us and I've done some research on my own. My belief is that the price of corn/beans is going to drop like a rock in the coming years and that habitat will return, but that may just be ignorant optimism. What other choice do I have but to be optimistic? I'm already a PF member and my life's goal is to own some property to manage for upland birds. I also believe that there will always be a few areas where several parcels of privately-owned land are managed for birds (or are at least more bird-friendly, like SW ND between Regent and Mott). I figure if I can buy a place next to a guy like Setternut, at least there will still be pockets of birds in that area. Why be pessimistic? Realistic is okay, but if you're not sure what's "really" going to happen, you may as well lean toward optimism:thumbsup:
 
If you look at bird numbers dropping or rising in percentages it is harder to rise well if the drop is 70% or more and increases are small yearly in good years.
Take that 100k number like this. Lets just use the number of 100,000 birds with a 70% decrease is down to 30,000 birds. If they increase 10% over a number of years it still takes many years to get back to 100k.
30,000 + a 10% increase is 33,000 ,
another year with a 20% increase is 39,600 ,
another good year with 10% increase is still only 43,550 birds. Add 4,355 birds the next +10% year and you still arent even half of what you had to start with.
Since the birds arent really competing with each other really for food and cover we are basically at the mercy of weather , cover/habitat for better numbers.
With many thousands of CRP acres being pulled out of the program it wont help. Lets just hope and pray for weather and other conditions to be perfect for years to come.
 
yeah, it will be damn tough for a real recovery to happen very soon...the decrease is always bigger and faster than the recovery...always.
 
kansasbrittany said:
oldandnew talks about commodity prices and how they correlate with land prices (I'm more interested in land prices these days than pheasant #'s).
Click to expand...

Something I remember my grandpa saying when I was young, talking about him and his brother farming. Grandpa bought his farm right out of school. His brother held off because 'he was waiting for land prices to drop'. They never did. He never owned his own farm.

Down in this area, crop prices don't determine a propertys value as much as its use for deer hunting. Tons of Texan's (singling them out :), but there are others) have bought property solely to deer hunt on. They don't touch it except during deer season. The guy with the gold makes the rules, so I can't hardly blame them, I'd buy me some deer hunting ground if I had the gold.

On a pheasant directed note, I agree the pulling of CRP back into crop rotation isn't good for pheasants. But I also want to point out (in my opinion), the best pheasant hunting in a CRP patch is in its first few years when it is a mix of weeds, crops, and grass. By the time it has matured into 90%+ grass, the pheasants don't seem to like it near as much. I guess it goes back to what they taught us in hunter safety class, the whole edge habitat, diversity thing.
 
Right on the money Cheasy. The heyday of pheasants thruought the country was when most of it was wild land with weeds , seeds and many millions of acres of wildgrasses.

Thats how a couple hundred pheasants stocked mainly in oregon I believe infected most of the nation in about 30 years with the wild bird we love.
 
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