(Radio Iowa) – D-N-R wildlife biologist Todd Bogenschutz says pheasants weren’t the only game bird that saw a drop in harvest numbers last year.  “Twenty-seven-thousand-500 quail reported harvested, which is about three-thousand less than the year before, so down a little bit,” Bogenschutz says. The drop in pheasants was attributed to a wet spring, but Bogenschutz says other weather impacted quail. “The quail are native to Iowa, so not an introduced species like pheasants, so they’re a little bit more tolerant to the rain and than pheasants are,” he says. “And so probably the bigger thing for quail would be the winter.”

Bogenschutz says this was a mild winter and that will help the quail population.”So I’m expecting to see our growth counts go up just because I think we probably had better survival of the birds we had this past winter because it was so mild. It’s not the rainfall can’t impact quail too, but we’ve got to get into that like nine and ten inch rain,” he says. Bogenschutz says the morning dove harvest was down a little bit too.

He says the counts were up for cottontail rabbits and that led to their harvest being up, with some 77-thousand cottontails taken statewide. The squirrel harvest was up 124-thousand squirrels statewide last year.