Good times return in Kansas pheasant range

Cackling as it gained altitude, the rooster pheasant took a high flight path over about a dozen hunters. The bird lost nary a feather despite what sounded like more bangs than a $10 pack of Black Cats. Laughter and shouts were even louder than the gun fire.

There seemed to be plenty of happiness on Saturday’s opening day of the Kansas pheasant season.

“I know we have more birds than we did last year,” said Mark Baldwin, of Wichita, as he led a group of about 20 hunters through Conservation Reserve Program fields his family upgrades for wildlife habitat with strips of milo. “It won’t be like it used to be, when we could kill around 70 birds by about 11, but we have birds this year.”

It was no secret.

Such was the pre-dawn talk in downtown Lewis, where the local First Baptist Church has held fund-raising breakfasts and dinners on opening day since 1993.

“We’re thinking we’ll do better than the last few years when bird numbers were so low,” Don Bales said as he served hot biscuits the size of softballs, to be smothered in sausage-laden gravy. “Four or five years ago, when we had so many birds, we’d serve 160 for breakfast and maybe around 260 for dinner. We’d like to see those days again.”

Baldwin and guests drove a caravan of pickups from the breakfast, dog boxes and dog trailers shaking as much from the canine excitement within as the bumpy country roads. The hunting grounds were the frosted grass corners around center pivot irrigation rigs that had grown corn during the summer.

“This grass is as good as it’s been in a long time, it’s good habitat,” Baldwin said. “A lot of farmers take their CRP out because it doesn’t pay as well as crops. We leave ours in. We feel we need to give back to the land.”

The corners gave back to Baldwin and his guests.

His family has hosted such hunts for at least 50 years. That experience made him the unmistakable leader of the group, reminding hunters to walk in straight lines, to keep their shots safe and directing them to downed birds that came from steady action.

“We’ve seen more birds on just these first two pushes than we did all of last year,” Rob Christensen, a Hutchinson native now living in Ohio, said at about 9 a.m.

By about 11:15, the covers had been thoroughly covered, and the group headed to a local farmyard for a Baldwin-hosted mega-feast, complete with homemade pies. Baldwin mistakenly called it “a little lunch.”

“That’s better than we’ve done the past three or four years,” Baldwin said after learning they’d brought in 21 rooster pheasants. “We should have had some more birds, maybe quite a few more birds. But the main thing is we had a lot of fun. It’s good.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 6:14 PM with the headline "Good times return in Kansas pheasant range."