Plentiful pheasants, quotients of quail

This is this the year to hire somebody to gather your leaves.

Go bird hunting instead.

We have enough pheasant and quail in most parts of Kansas that even those with only a passing interest in upland bird hunting need to record those football and basketball games and watch them as their leg muscles recover after dark. It should be worth the pain.

“... 80 bushel (per acre) wheat and 90 bushel pheasants” is the text I got from a friend west of Dodge City when I inquired about the harvest and the hatch in June. In September, while scouting for teal at a public area within about an hour of Wichita, I flushed more than a dozen pheasants, including five roosters within 20 yards, on a 200-yard hike.

A buddy talked more about the nine coveys of quail he saw driving to a pond in the sandhills than his limit of doves Labor Day weekend. A Flint Hills rancher, who hadn’t had a bird dog for about 10 years, sent an e-mail saying he was buying a partially-trained dog because of all he was seeing this summer. On a prairie chicken hunt in early October, three of us watched as quail streamed from the prairie grass like bats from a cave in front of a solid point by a pointer. Some photos shot at least 20 birds in the air at once. The dog pointed another six after the main body of birds was gone.

Don’t let this opportunity get away.

OK, so we don’t have the numbers of birds we did in the 1980s, the decade with which we geezers will bore grandchildren with stories for decades to come. No, there aren’t even as many pheasants as there were five or six years ago, before drought crashed the population to all-time lows. But in many places we have a lot more birds than last year, which was a lot more than the year before that.

Many said last year was the best quail season they’d had in 15 years. This one looks better in many places.

The hunting will probably be fair at worst in some areas while downright great in others, especially compared to how it was three and four years ago.

“I had no idea the pheasant population could bounce back as fast it has,” said the farmer friend west of Dodge City. “Last year we only had enough to hunt one day. This year we’ll hunt the entire season. We should get a lot of birds.”

Look, I’m not going to guarantee limits, or easy hunts. We have a lot of cover, it looks like we’re going to have a warm fall and the best dogs in the world won’t smell to their potential if we don’t get some rain.

But you still need to go. I can guarantee you it won’t always be like this. If we are lucky it may be as good, or even better next year, but meteorologists say we’re heading into a long dry cycle in Kansas. We’re losing more and more habitat, like Conservation Reserve Program grasses, year after year.

But we’ll have more than enough birds for making some great memories within the seasons that open next weekend and run through Jan. 31.

Go, and go often.

This story was originally published November 7, 2015 at 4:33 PM with the headline "Plentiful pheasants, quotients of quail."