I believe the hawks and turkeys are to blame for the majority of the decline in the pheasant population. We need to open up a season on hawks. It is not rare to see a bunch of them sitting on almost every telephone pole. I have witnessed many of them trying to get a pheasant. I am not sure about the turkeys, I have just heard they eat the eggs. The pheasants have declined with the growth of the turkey population. There is a lot of public hunting land near here that a person could kill almost anything (pheasant, deer, quail and turkeys). Now you just see deer and turkeys. So, that is what I hunt now, deer and turkeys. I used to hunt pheasant and quail quite a bit, but not anymore, it is good excersize. That is about it.

A lot of the land around my house is used by a hunting club. They release about three hundred birds each weekend for guys to hunt. Those birds do not survive very well. With those numbers being released you would think they would be all around my house, but they are not. The birds are raised right down the road and they are not the smartest bird on the block.

I look for the pheasant population to get even worse. This year with the drought, the farmers were able to bale a lot of that CRP, set aside for habitat, to use for cattle. This surely will not help.

So, in my opinion lets go deer hunting and forget about the birds.