The amount of birds I'm seeing is hard to describe. Pheasants aren't like rats....they're like cockroaches. The amount of tiny chicks....I'm talking freaking tiny....like a few weeks old, still half fuzz and half feathers coming in.....is just stupid. I don't know if the poor fukcers will make it if it gets cold early.....luckily it's still been hitting upper 80's and even 90's out here. Driving up prairie trails there's literally hundreds of birds running up it in front of the truck. It's hard to not hit them. All the Oilfield guys i know have had to replace headlights, grills, etc., from hitting pheasants....multiple times. I know a dude who's had his work truck in five times from fukcing it up by hitting pheasants. The counts say there's 164 pheasants per hundred miles in the NW part of the state. SW MN had an 82 count per 100 miles....
....there is no freaking way, zero percent chance, that there's only two pheasants out here for every one in SW MN. There's obviously no way of being certain but I'd be shocked if the real ratio is less than 25 to 1. There's more birds out here this year than I've ever seen anywhere at any time......by a wide margin. There was a lot of birds last year that all made it through a historically mild winter, nested, had excellent conditions with the wet spring....drought is what limits bird numbers out here......yes, a lot of nests were lost to rain, chicks lost to hypothermia....but one thing I'm seeing and realizing firsthand is that a hen pheasant will keep trying to hatch and raise a brood as many times as she can. No joke, I'm seeing a lot of tiny chicks that couldn't have hatched any earlier than the second half of August.
A lot of the countryside was planted in canola and obviously wheat and small grains. It makes for good cover.. I think the birds are more likely to be next to roads in MN due to the nature of the farming. Pheasants will hide in standing corn but they don't like milling about in it or spend significant time in it....it's dirt on the ground.. .just dirt. They like shit the can tuck themselves down on and "bed" in.....I'm sure you've all seen pheasant beds in grass....not that different than a deer bed in the same cover, just a hell of a lot smaller. They like being protected and not having shit above them so they can see and they can flush.
All I know is with a lot of the cover on the countryside coming out.....all of it being cover, like almost 100% of the landscape being suitable to good pheasant nesting cover.....they don't count them as easily out here, or after they count so many they say "fuggit." There's inherently going to be a bias in the roadside count....not bias, but factor that skews it......fewer bird areas are going to get counted more precisely. My understanding is a lot of the routes are observed by mail carriers. After seeing umpteen dozen birds they're going to care about not missing counting any less and less. When they're in abundance, and especially a ridiculous overabundance, tallying each bird for the survey has less and less importance. An area where pheasants are essentially a novelty....they're going to count every last damn one.
25:1 ratio of birds here compared to birds in SW MN.....minimal. Bold statement until you see it.....then you realize I'm being conservative, if anything.