(Area) Saturday marks the start of pheasant season in Iowa.
With good conditions over the winter and spring for pheasant survival, the upcoming season has a lot of hunters excited. Bryan Hayes with the Iowa DNR says, “The wait is about over. We are going to open that pheasant season on October 31st. It’s kind of a highly anticipated season opener. We have the best counts out there in a decade. Six of the nine regions in the state averaged more than 20 pheasants per route which is the most since 2007.”
Hayes says hunters are looking forward to a good season for multiple reasons. Outside of an increased population another plus is the harvest progress. “It’s the exact opposite of what we faced last year when 90% of the corn and 40% of the beans were still in the field last year. We should be able to find places to hunt that don’t have a lot of standing crops around. That should make for a good opener. That 20 birds per route is as good as we’ve seen for a long time.”
Last year 52,000 pheasant hunters harvested 284,000 pheasants. In 2008 there were 86,000 hunters harvesting nearly 400,000 pheasants. The DNR is hoping to see numbers closer to what happened a dozen years ago. “If we increase our hunter numbers we could see a harvest approaching a half a million pheasants in the state which is something we haven’t accomplished for a long time. I think the birds are out there we just are looking for more people to get out and pick up the slack and get out and enjoy this pheasant hunting that Iowa provides.”
Hayes says there has been more interest from non-residents than they’ve had in recent years which can be a positive economic impact in rural Iowa.
