The Time Capsule: A Culture Ended? Game Birds Nearly Gone

 During the past month my wife and I took several rides to Viking Lake to see the swans. Seven of them, five impressive mature birds and two gray and white youngsters, made quite a sight.  

On a typical late afternoon we could watch the swans, a couple of thousand geese and ducks settling in for the night—the latter harassed by a pair of bald eagles—and one day a few loons joined the fracas. Leaving the lake we counted deer.  

Outside the gates there’s not much wild game to be seen.    

I have not seen a pheasant in more than a year. A farmer I spoke with worked a thousand acres last fall without encountering a pheasant.  He doesn’t remember the last time he saw a quail.  

This brought to mind an experience from six or seven years ago. An old friend from high school was in the area for a hunt. On a pleasant November afternoon I drove to a nearby motel to see how he’d done. He and about a dozen other out-of-state hunters, plus at least as many dogs, were in the parking lot posing for pictures.  In order for them all to be included, I was given a stack of cameras and clicked away.  

They’d had a grand time. Three dozen roosters, plus a nice number of quail, were arrayed in the foreground. I’m sure memories of that day, and others like it, linger with them even yet.  

Now the birds are gone; the hunters aren’t coming back.  

In less than a decade an entire culture of outdoor sports in southwest Iowa has ended.  After 80 years our once-abundant pheasant population is all but gone.  

And, for reasons I don’t understand, the DNR encourages the few die-hard gunners remaining to get out there and shoot the one or two rooster-birds that might have survived.  

Having a quail season, with generous daily bag limits, makes as much sense as an open season on trumpeter swans; the difference being there’s actually a chance of seeing a swan.    

Motels that once catered to upland game hunters have dismantled their dog kennels.  Restaurants that sold hunters hearty, pre-dawn breakfast specials lost a customer base. My brother from Minnesota was among scores who made the annual trek to Montgomery County, spending close to $100 for out-of-state license fees, a couple of hundred more for lodging. He ate well in nice restaurants and was a good tipper. He purchased gasoline and clothes and one year an early snowstorm prompted him to buy a sweater for his bird dog. He bought ammunition and snacks and Ben-Gay and on those rare occasions when he actually hit something, he’d spring for a bottle of Templeton Rye.  

He didn’t care much whether he took birds home, but he liked to see them and give his dog a chance to perform.  Now he goes to South Dakota or north to hunt grouse.  

If experts are right; that birds have vanished due to brutal road-shoulder-to-shoulder farming, the leveling of every fence row and thicket and bit of cover standing in the way of another row of ethanol, and that the endless expanse of barren fields we see in the winter are now the norm, then prospects for the return of pheasants and quail are not good.    

There’s some justice to that. Our area newspapers, way back in the 19-teens and 20s and 30s, repeatedly carried articles about farmers who were raising and releasing pheasants and quail. The Conservation Commission helped, providing fertile eggs and baby chicks.  It was farmers, though, who raised them and fed them to maturity, who tossed out a shovel of corn when the ice was thick or snow was deep. Farmers sustained the birds until they became self-sufficient, and even then helped them through the hard times. The first few hunting seasons in this county were not what they might have been because so many farmers, having grown attached to “their” birds, didn’t want them shot (or, in the inane term of today, “harvested”).  

More importantly, farms were then diversified, chemical free, divided into small fields and offered habitat.  

Farming practices gave, I suppose, and have now taken away.   

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com

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