The drought finally may be broken across much of eastern Colorado. The question remains: Is the recent rainfall too late to fix the pheasant season?
Even as much-needed moisture soaks large portions of the plains, the verdict is mixed on whether it arrived too late to salvage a hatch that might have made the coming autumn the best hunt in a decade.
Ah, what might have been. On the crest of a solid 2005 population and another mild winter, Colorado’s prime pheasant areas greeted spring 2006 with one of the strongest breeding populations in memory.
Fickle weather had other ideas. A drought that in some ways rivaled the horror of 2002 devastated cover, notably the green wheat crucial to nesting success while depriving young chicks of the moisture essential for survival.
“We have difficulty parlaying a strong breeding population with good production conditions,” said Ed Gorman, state small game chief. “We don’t seem to hit it right.”
Of late, Gorman has searched the heavens and found some cause for optimism. A hop- scotch rain pattern in the past few weeks may have salvaged the hatch in some places. Trouble is, he is certain the traditional pheasant areas in northeast Colorado received little of the downpour. This will translate to an autumn checkerboard that will reward hunters who do their homework and punish those who don’t.
“Without a doubt, there’ll be places in eastern Colorado where you’ll find lots of pheasants,” Gorman said.
Gorman toured parts of the northeast over the weekend and affirmed these blurred lines of precipitation.
“Wheat stubble is short and clean and CRP is in bad shape,” he said.
The biologist places most of his pheasant eggs in the single basket of renesting. Where rain fell in recent weeks, causing weed cover to sprout, Gorman has reason to expect that these resilient birds will have some success with second nests. But there never can be total compensation for early failure.
“All thing equal, nesting habitat isn’t as good as the past couple of years,” said Gorman, who nonetheless believes there won’t be a drastic change in autumn numbers.
Much the same conditions exist in southeast Colorado, where recent heavy rains won’t balance severe drought that caused a sparse, early wheat harvest.
“The habitat has come on strong lately and there’s a good possibility of renesting,” southeast biologist Trent Verquer said of an area that a year ago provided the state’s best success rate. “The true impact won’t be known for a few weeks, but almost certainly it won’t be as good as last year.”
Verquer expects the southeast’s core areas to again produce good bird numbers, while fringe zones that played well during last season’s bounty are projected to tumble.
Again mirroring the northeast, Verquer’s territory sported an exceptional breeding population, including some of the highest since records were kept.
Interestingly, Gorman makes a case that while prime habitat conditions generally produce more pheasants, this doesn’t always transfer to the bag.
“When there’s lower habitat quality, it becomes easier to find birds, which translates to hunting success,” he said.
For the record, the 2005-06 Colorado harvest estimate of 53,000 birds represents a 10 percent gain over the previous season. Further, it marked just one of three seasons in history when the annual bag per hunter averaged higher than three. The others were 1983 and 1999.
Gone, probably never to return, are the boom years of the 1950s when Colorado hunters took home more than 200,000 pheasants. But a sharp decline in bird numbers tied to farming practices and a general loss of habitat also reverberated in a loss of hunter interest.
But, as Gorman noted, the balance comes in a comparable bag ratio.
“Last year, hunters enjoyed as much success as during the boom years,” he said.
Gorman won’t venture a guess on quail prospects in the northeast, but said nesting conditions in river bottom areas probably won’t be materially impacted by drought.
Not so for scaled quail in the southeast, where severe drought conditions surely negated the promise of a large breeding population. Recent heavy rainfall may have come too late to save what might have been a banner season.
