I send out a newsletter to the guys I hunt pheasants with. It has been very dry in South Dakota, with the drought maybe at its worst in the center of the state (the water behind the dam at Pierre is down FOURTY FEET from normal!). There are areas that were blessed with rain, so it gets spotty the farther out from Pierre you go. There were some good rains this past week across the state, but too late to help the crops for many.
Below is an article from this weeks Sioux Falls Argus Leader you may find interesting.
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GFP counts pheasants - Annual survey might be affected by drought
BEN SHOUSE
bshouse@argusleader.com July 25, 2006
Drought might not be hurting South Dakota's pheasants yet, but it might impair the precision of its annual brood count, which begins next week.
The Game, Fish and Parks Department says the 2005 pheasant season was the biggest since 1963.
GFP personnel will conduct the 2006 brood survey Aug. 1-15. It involves traveling the same 110 routes each year and counting young pheasants. The pheasants-per-mile and brood size numbers are used to estimate the state's pheasant population.
But the ongoing drought could make the birds harder to find, said the GFP's Tony Leif. High humidity is ideal for the survey. It creates morning dew that forces pheasants out of the vegetation and into the view of the bird counters. "The dry conditions will depress the number of birds you will see," Leif said.
As for the survival of those birds, a drought in July is not as bad as a drought in May or June, he said. "When they're younger, that green vegetation is very important, because it supports a variety of invertebrate life - little bugs that the pheasants can eat. But as those birds age, their diet becomes much more diverse."
The mild winter of 2005-06 also was a boon to the population. Other than an ice storm right after Thanksgiving, there was little to hurt overwintering pheasants. But drought-like conditions from the North Dakota border south and on both sides of the Missouri River have hit some of the traditional hot spots for pheasants. Many of those areas also had triple-digit temperatures this month. Mobridge has received less than 2 inches of rain since April. Onida, Pierre and Murdo have had less than 4 inches.
State Climatologist Dennis Todey said it was the second-driest June on record at Redfield, and the April-through-June period was the second driest on record at Pierre, Eureka and Kadoka. But there is reason to believe things won't be as bad as the drought of 2002, Leif said. "We dried out a lot sooner in 2002 than we did in 2006. I remember some of those triple-digit highs hitting us in June," he said. "So that's reason for some optimism, but I guess I wouldn't go so far as to say we're optimistic about how that hatch has gone. We'll know a lot more after those surveys."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Reach Ben Shouse at 331-2318
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South Dakota Drought?
