Hunters had good weather most of the upland season, and habitat remained strong on the landscape where it could be accessed, likely resulting in a good harvest of grouse, partridge and pheasants in the state. Review of wings from upland birds submitted by hunters is beginning at the North Dakota Game & Fish Department, and will help confirm trends and provide a status update for those species headed into spring of 2025. Simonson Photo.
By Nick Simonson
Generally favorable fall conditions allowed upland hunters across North Dakota access to the state’s acres to find partridge, grouse and pheasants in 2024, making for a good season. As upland wing surveys get underway, agents of the North Dakota Game & Fish Department (NDG&F) will get a better understanding of not only how populations of the state’s upland birds are setting up as winter begins to wane, but also how sportsmen fared in the field, according to RJ Gross, NDG&F Upland Game Biologist.
“Any upland hunting season that you can comfortably hunt up until the last day I think is a success just in that. In North Dakota, there’s been years we’ve had blizzards in October and November, and you have to go through feet of snow to get anywhere. As far as that the weather was just about perfect,” Gross relates, adding, “as far as bird numbers, I thought there were lots of pheasants. In my experience there were plenty of birds to be had.”
A temperate start to fall produced ample opportunities in September and early October for sharptailed grouse and Hungarian partridge. The two species were down slightly in the agency’s 2024 summer roadside brood counts from their decadal highs tallied in in 2023. The total partridge observed two summers ago tied a record in the survey, meaning that the smaller upland birds were still plentiful in the most recent season, and according to reports, were still often encountered by hunters.
“I saw a bunch of partridge and I heard people saw good numbers of partridge. I know they were down a little bit, as far as we’re looking at our surveys, but that was also a tie of an all-time high, so even being down a bit is pretty good numbers,” Gross reports on partridge prevalence in the state.
Pheasant populations remained strong across the Peace Garden State, as the birds recovered from setbacks in drought years of 2017 and 2021 and a tough winter in 2022-23. Overall, the habitat that remained on the landscape provided good nesting cover in spring and was still intact after a temperate summer. While dry conditions did drag on in the western quarter of the state, grassy areas on opening day in October held birds for hunters to pursue and kept them for much of the season. However, habitat, Gross suggests, is not the major concern that hunters are facing throughout North Dakota, particularly in the northwestern quarter of the state.
“Access, that’s kind of becoming a limiting factor. It seems ever since Covid, the secret you could say is out for North Dakota,” Gross explains, “pheasant numbers were up obviously, and there’s a lot of pheasant hunters who come here, so that’s getting a little bit tougher. I’ve heard some grumblings,” he explained about the growing pressure and limited public access in the state.
With a solid harvest, Gross and the rest of the upland team at the agency will set to work in February on reviewing those wings from birds sent in by hunters throughout the season. Through their review of those samples during the next two months, the NDG&F will get a better understanding of age ratios, approximate hatch dates, bootstrap harvest numbers and other important information which will help assess the population of partridge, grouse and pheasants as they headed into winter, and the data will help confirm the spring crowing count and summer survey numbers and the trends suggested through those samples from last year.
“[The wing analysis] is another metric that we can use that backs up our late summer roadside counts. Looking at the adult-to-juvenile ratio, last year was really good, it was almost three-and-a-half juveniles per adult bird that we got turned in for the wings. We usually get between 5,000 on a bad year, to 10,000 of those just for pheasants turned in. I would assume it would be a little bit lower, but I think production this year was better than most people thought, and hopefully that will come through when we go through the results,” Gross concludes.
The NDG&F typically releases wing survey results and an estimate of total harvest from the previous season in mid-May of each year.
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.