Nebraskaland

38 Nebraskaland • November 2023 them through most winters, and plenty of grassland habitat to sustain the population. Pheasants tend to do well where there is a matrix of row crop fi elds interspersed with grasslands, but there are enough native food items for them to make a living at the refuge in the absence of agricultural crops. The pheasant density here is nothing like you would fi nd in South Dakota, but there are usually enough here to make it fun to chase them. Bobwhite quail are usually pretty scarce here, although there is often a covey or two around. While they are legal to hunt on the refuge, I wouldn't plan on coming here for a quail hunt. Bobwhite numbers here are typically low. Gray partridge have been documented on the refuge in the past, but I have not encountered one here, so I would have to say encountering a partridge on the refuge would indeed be a chance encounter. Besides the refuge, what other nearby public lands are good for upland bird hunting? McKelvie National Forest has been good for prairie grouse recently, and the staff there has been making a map of its grazing program available each fall to help hunters decide where to go on the forest. Similar to the refuge, most of their prairie grouse harvest is sharp-tailed grouse with a good sprinkling of greater prairie- chickens in the mix. There are several Nebraska Game and Parks Commission wildlife management areas nearby that provide opportunities for both prairie grouse and pheasants — and the occasional quail. Ballard's Marsh has a good mix of habitat that makes for a nice place to try for grouse or roosters. Merritt Reservoir and Schlagel Creek WMAs can also hold some birds. Tell me about the wing bee. What have you learned from it? Valentine and Crescent Lake national wildlife refuges, and Nebraska National Forest, Bessey Division and McKelvie National Forest all have locations for prairie grouse hunters to drop off one wing from each grouse they harvest. These volunteer wing return boxes have envelopes that hunters can place wings in, and they are asked to fi ll out some information about their hunt; providing names or address is optional, but it would be great if the date, number of hunters and number of birds harvested were fi lled in. Nebraska Game and Parks also collects a sample of wings from the east and west prairie grouse zones. After the grouse season closes, a group of biologists gets together for the Prairie Grouse Wing Bee — here, we go through all of the wings that hunters submitted and determine the species of grouse (sharp-tailed grouse or greater prairie-chicken, and sometimes we can pick out hybrids), and then determine from the wing molt if the bird is an adult or juvenile (or hatch year bird = bird hatched in that year). We use this information to calculate a juvenile to adult ratio from the harvest, and if hunters provide the date of the hunt, we can backdate from the known age of a juvenile grouse to fi gure out an approximate hatch date. Calculating the hatch date can shed some light on habitat conditions and how successful hens were at hatching their fi rst nesting attempt versus a second or third try. If there is adequate nesting cover — residual vegetation from the previous year — hens can begin nesting earlier (and the peak of hatching would be earlier) than if they need to delay nesting to use the current year's growth for concealment, which pushes the peak of hatching later. If there are two peaks in hatch dates, it shows that a number of fi rst nesting attempts failed and the hens renested and hatched a second attempt. These data provide a measure of the harvest on these public lands, and the ratio of juveniles to adults in the harvest provides an index of grouse production. When the number of juveniles in the harvest is high relative to the number of adults, it represents a year of good production while ratios with more adults show poor reproduction. A ratio with 2.5 or more juveniles per adult in the harvest is A sharptail forages among the grass. Grouse tend to avoid uniformly short or uniformly tall vegetation.

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