The author and his Lab, Hanna Banana, show off the results of a successful northern-tier pheasant hunt. Photo courtesy of Ted Peck.

"I don't hunt pheasants anymore," Matt Denniston grumbled while reeling in a scrappy smallmouth in my guide boat last summer. "There simply aren't any birds around. Ten of us used to go out opening day around Spirit Lake, get our 30 birds and be eating chili by 11 a.m. Nowadays pheasant hunting is more work than enjoyable social recreation."

Before our trip was over, Denniston gave me the names of a couple of farmer friends who would probably let me "waste my time" stumbling around after ringnecks this fall.

In spite of the fact that we're losing about 200 square miles of CRP acreage on private land every year, getting permission from a landowner is still your shortest route to a heavy game bag. Knocking on doors for permission to hunt isn't as productive as it used to be in the Hawkeye State, but most folks have little trouble finding a place through friend-of-a-friend contacts or over a cup of coffee and piece of pie at a local café.

Pheasants are a byproduct of agriculture in Iowa and will remain such as long as tractors can be seen in our fields -- even though 800,000 acres have been turned over behind those green tractors since the early 1990s. Every acre that goes back into crop production on private lands makes the outstanding, perpetual habitat found on Iowa's public hunting grounds that much more appealing.

It has been several years since Iowa has seen a million-bird pheasant harvest. Last season's "paltry" 400,000 ringneck total still rates right up there with talk about grain prices, Hawkeyes and hurricanes at local coffee shops, even though the season at hand should result in a notable increase in pheasant harvest this year when all the numbers are in.

"If weather patterns return to normal, we should see a million-pheasant harvest again by the 2010 or 2011 season," IDNR pheasant guru Todd Bogenschutz said. "The ringneck population -- especially in northeast Iowa -- is definitely on the rebound. I wouldn't be surprised to see our totals nearly double from last year when all the numbers are in, even though there is no end to the downward spiral of CRP participation in sight.

"I have great faith in Mother Nature," Bogenschutz continued. "We still have good habitat. As long as those hen pheasants can find a safe place to drop those 11 eggs on the ground, we will have ringnecks. Of course, having Mother Nature smile with a little less heavy snow cover and fewer wet springs will certainly help enhance our upland game numbers.

"The spring of 2008 was the wettest Iowa has ever seen in the 130 years we've kept records. The winter of 2007-08 was the 10th worst ever. Weather -- not loss of habitat -- is the primary reason we harvested historically low pheasant numbers last fall. Habitat is still the key to pheasant survival. We still have plenty of good habitat available in this state.