G&F: With the energy crunch, farmers are now putting more of their properties that were enrolled in CRP into corn production. How bad is this hurting the pheasant and quail habitat? In other words (if you have any statistics), how many acres of CRP have we lost to making ethanol?

Veverka: Between Sept. 1, 2006 and Oct. 31, 2007, we have had 3,002 acres of land withdrawn from the CRP program; however, this still leaves us with 295,000 acres of CRP land, so we have been very fortunate thus far. We suspect that more acreage will be withdrawn as farmers start looking more closely at market prices and begin planning for the 2008 planting season.

As far as its impact on Indiana’s game birds, most of the withdrawn acreage has not been coming from our traditional pheasant range and good bobwhite counties, and the majority (1,648 acres) of the acres being withdrawn are tracts of land that were enrolled in existing established grasses (CP10). This means that most of these tracts were probably rank stands of grasses (fescue/brome) with poor wildlife value.

G&F: By all accounts, the reserved pheasant hunts are one of the best programs the DFW provides. Will the number of hunts increase in 2008 or stay the same as in 2007?

Veverka: The number of reserved pheasant hunts will remain about the same for the 2008-2009 season.

WATERFOWL
Biologist Adam Phelps discusses ducks and geese in Hoosierland.

G&F: How was the 2007 waterfowl-hunting season in terms of harvests?

Phelps: The responses I’ve received from the fish and wildlife areas so far indicate that it was a very good year. Despite the drought, it seemed that most properties had enough water to hold good numbers of ducks. Of course, a water shortage can also function to concentrate birds on whatever water they can find.

G&F: How is the overall health of the waterfowl populations (both ducks and geese) that fly through Indiana on their yearly migration routes? Is any one species declining or increasing when compared with typical trends from recent years?

Phelps: Overall, waterfowl in the Mississippi Flyway are doing very well. Canvasbacks, redheads and northern shovelers were at record numbers on the breeding grounds this past year.

American widgeons, which have been declining for some time, had a good year. Northern pintails were about the same as last year. While this is not great news, at least we didn’t see an additional decline.

Scaup were also about the same numbers wise last year as in 2006. I would be surprised if we do not see additional bag restrictions on scaup in the next few years. American black ducks also remain at very low numbers. Overall, apart from those few species, ducks in North America are doing quite well right now.