IOWA CITY PRESS-CITIZEN

9:25 AM, Oct. 20, 2011

Pheasants: Where we are now?

An extra inch or two of spring rain. A few more inches of winter snow. Each by itself raises short-term concern for Iowa’s pheasant population. Strung together over multiple years, they spell major trouble for Iowa’s pheasant population as well as our tradition of pheasant hunting and the economic boost it provides rural Iowa.

Heading into the 2011 season, the projected harvest is 150,000 to 200,000 roosters and again it’s a record low. This week, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources features a daily look at King Pheasant —the past, now and what lies ahead. Mick Klemesrud and I worked up the features with lots of help from our biologists and others, facing the severe downturn.

Why the plunge? The primary factor is one we cannot change — the weather. Coming out of the 2010-2011 winter, Iowa marked five years in a row of average statewide snowfall of more than 30 inches. That causes heavy mortality among overwintering pheasants. In a half century of standardized data collection, Iowa pheasant numbers never have increased in a year following a winter with 31 inches of snow.

But where there is quality habitat, there are pheasants. Bill Kron owns 200 acres near West Branch. He works burning into his management regimen and also grows alfalfa, clover and small food plots.

“Our counts are down, but I can still go down a mile long stretch of gravel and count 10 pheasants — more or less — on any given day,” Kron said.

He lives within minutes of the two 30-mile Cedar County routes surveyed each August by DNR biologists. One route yielded zero pheasants this summer and the other tallied one.

Drivers should be on the lookout for deer

I didn’t miss him by much — maybe 12 to 15 yards of air between my headlights and the little basket buck — in the 5 a.m. darkness Monday. I hadn’t seen him until he was at the centerline on Highway 136, south of Dyersville. Ironically, I was on my way up to sit in a tree stand.

The others were along Highway 382, west of Solon a few nights ago. A doe stood on the gravel shoulder, with at least one other gray-brown form with her. On that stretch of the highway in October and November, I slow down a few miles an hour and I am ready to break if they bolt. The car behind me was not as patient. I recognized a neighbor as she passed me with her tail lights speeding away. She ran interference for me as we continued home.

‘Tis the season. No, not Halloween, but scarier as deer explode across the road. For the next four weeks, Iowa’s whitetails will be more active and more visible. November is the month with the highest number of deer/vehicle collisions in Iowa. Still, that trend is down, and it is pretty easy to match up the drop with a pronounced upturn in deer hunting.

Hunters are Iowa’s primary deer management tool. And county-specific zones, antlerless tags and special zone hunts are showing that we can do a pretty good job of bringing down deer numbers where needed. Just as the deer harvest climbed through the mid- 2000s, Iowa’s road kill deer numbers dropped.

Yet it would be foolish not to stay the alert — especially in the Iowa and Cedar river corridors with a heavy network of creeks and forest/brushy cover. Your best bet is to scan roadsides for deer, don’t “overdrive your headlights” in low light and dark periods. If you see one on the side of the road, expect more. Simply put, slow down. And if a collision cannot be avoided, it usually is safer to hit the animal than to swerve into oncoming traffic or leave the roadway. Trees, bridge railings and utility poles are out there. And they don’t move.

These increased sightings come as bucks careen toward the mid-November peak of the breeding period. They chase does, which are not ready to breed yet. They push younger bucks out of their mother’s territory. The young bucks try to stake out a few acres of their own. Dominant bucks won’t hear of it. That means lots of deer movement during the daytime and all night.

Those deer alerts coincide, also, with Iowa’s crop harvest. Millions of acres of cornstalk cover are coming out of the fields. Reclusive whitetails are concentrated into field edges, fence lines and woods. A third factor is that the most active periods for deer movement are sunrise and sunset, and they now fall in our morning and evening commute.

Still, vehicle/deer crashes have dropped significantly in the last few years. For 2010, Iowa’s traffic deer kill was 10,153 — down from 13,518 in 2009 and 15,361 in 2004. That period coincides with expanded issuance of county-specific antlerless tags to hunters to harvest more does and bring the herd down to mid-1990s levels. The hunter harvest of deer in Iowa rose from 2003 (182,856) to our peak in 2005 (211,451). As numbers dropped, so has the harvest, showing at 127,094 in 2010, as deer populations in more counties reach or approach target levels.

The drop comes as Iowa’s drivers rack up more miles behind the wheel. The road kill index for the last three years is lower than for any year since 1992, when we logged about 15 billion miles. It now is closing in on 19 billion.

So stay alert, slow down a little. And if you really want to recognize the management of Iowa’s deer herd, thank the hunters and the biologists who crunch the numbers to balance the hunting opportunities.

Joe Wilkinson, information specialist for the Department of Natural Resources, is the Press-Citizen's outdoors columnist. His column appears on Thursdays.