Iowa pheasant hunters bagged 460,000 birds in 2024, which was a drop of 130,000 birds from 2023. DNR biologist Todd Bogenschutz says he’ll still take that number.
“Our numbers were we’re definitely good. I mean our second best harvest in about the last 17 years or so,” he says. “We knew they were probably going to be down because the roadside count showed they were down a little bit, but yeah, overall, hunters still did extremely well last fall.”
Bogenschutz says the numbers show the populations have come back from the big drop more than a decade ago. “Twenty-eleven or 12, I forget the exact year, we were down to basically 100,000 roosters, so you know, we’re five or six times higher than that now. So yeah, second highest harvest in the country,” Bogenschutz says. “The only state that harvested more pheasants in Iowa was South Dakota and we’ve been numbrr two in the country for the last I want to say at least four years, maybe five.”
He says northern Iowa continues to have more birds harvest than southern Iowa. “The hunter success hasn’t been as good down there as it has been up like in the northern part of the state. That’s been the case for the last 20to 25 years, I think it’s more of a habitat thing, and also just the climate in the state,” he says. “You know, it seems like when we get more than eight inches of rainfall in April and May, we just don’t get good reproduction in the southern third of the state.”
Iowa hunters once harvested one million pheasants in a season, but Bogenschutz says the loss of habitat in the Conservation Reserve Program likely will keep that from happening. But he thinks the recent numbers are sustainable. “I think if Mother Nature gives us good weather, we can definitely be in that 5 to 600,000 mark. You know, unless something changes with CRP and we had some habitat, we might be able to get back to the million mark. But given the habitat that we have, I think hunters have been pretty happy,” Bogenschutz says.
Bogenschutz thinks the spring weather this year should lead to good numbers for birds and this year’s hunt that starts in October. He’ll know for sure after the annual roadside survey in August.