Of birds and butterflies

SOMETIME AROUND THE YEAR 2000, A FRIEND OF MINE ALERTED ME TO SOME PUBLIC ACCESS HUNTING AREAS IN SOUTHWESTERN NEBRASKA.  With his good reports in mind, I waited until a couple of weeks after the pheasant opener to make sure the crowds had gone home, loaded Flick the Brittany in the back of the truck, and made the three-hour drive from Cheyenne to investigate.

Turned out, my friend was right.  I wasn’t keeping written records back then, so I have to depend on my memories of those hunts, and the memories are quite pleasant.  With a capable pointing dog in front of me, I moved sixty or eighty pheasants on a typical day.  Some days, I missed a chance or two, and we came home with a pair of birds or just one.  Some days, we walked twelve or fourteen miles to get three or four good chances and came home long after dark.  Once or twice, we walked out of the cover with three roosters at nine in the morning.  It was nothing like the huge flocks of pheasants South Dakota offered in those days, but, if I held up my end of the bargain, Flick would give me three or four great points over the course of a long day, and we’d come home with all the birds the law allowed.

A fair number of pheasants, an occasional sharptail or covey of quail, more cover than there were hunters, all of this within a four-hour drive from home— it was the kind of situation that appeals to me.  So three generations of dogs and I have gone back to those same places every fall and winter over the last twenty-five years.

I didn’t start keeping records until the fall of 2020, but my general impression of the places the dogs and I kept visiting was a steady decline in the number of pheasants we moved and the number we brought home.  Twenty years ago, I’d guess we averaged something like 2.5 roosters in the bag per day, sometimes a very long day, but, still, a legal limit more days than not.  My hunting diary confirms the decline over the last five years:

1.5 pheasants brought to the bag per day in 2020,

1.2 in 2021,

0.6 in 2022,

0.7 in 2023,

and 0.8 last season.

It’s getting to be a long dry spell.

There have been changes. When the hunting was particularly good in the early 2000s, the hunting pressure on the walk-in areas increased perceptibly, although I never saw a day when I couldn’t find a field to hunt by myself.  The amount of CRP has declined steadily over the last ten years, which has reduced the amount of cover in the walk-in areas.  The summer of 2022 was exceptionally dry, so the folks at the Natural Resources Conservation Service allowed farmers to cut hay on their CRP, which drastically reduced the amount of cover that fall and winter as well as the amount of nesting and brood-rearing cover in the spring of 2023, which meant poor recruitment for the fall of 2023.  Still, the winter of 2023-24 was mild, and the summer of 2024 was nearly ideal for pheasant nesting.  The pheasants barely responded.  As you might expect, the hunting pressure has fallen off drastically, simply because there were practically no birds to be found.

I’m the first to admit that my data set is severely biased.  The hunting was so bad in 2022 and 2023 that the dogs and I didn’t get back to Nebraska as often as we have other years.  Some years, I’ve hunted with veteran dogs; some years, I’ve had beginners.  Still, the numbers of pheasants the dogs and I move on the same landscape have steadily diminished over the years.

And the annual summer pheasant surveys run by the Nebraska Game and Parks Department show a trend frighteningly similar to the drop in my numbers.  Every region of the state has seen a steady decline in the number of pheasants rural mail carriers see along country roads.  Every region has seen a drop in pheasant numbers that began sometime in the early to mid-1980s and has never recovered.  In the southwest region where I’ve hunted, survey numbers have dropped more than eighty percent since 1970, fifty percent since 2010.[i]

 Those of you who have hunted pheasants as long as I have will remember that the conservation title of the modern Farm Bill launched the Conservation Reserve Program in 1985.  Conservationists in farm country welcomed the advent of CRP and its sister programs, and there’s little doubt that the long-term cover established under the Farm Bill slowed the decline of grassland birds, game and nongame, across the Midwest and out onto the Great Plains.

Slowed the decline . . . but didn’t stop it, let alone reverse it.  Something has changed in pheasant country, something 20 or 30 million acres of federally subsidized cover hasn’t fully remedied.  As I’ve meandered through the cover after the dogs over the last twenty-five years, I’ve had more and more time between points by the Brittanies to consider what’s happened to pheasants and other birds in the farming heartland.  I’ve started to consider the possibility that food has become even more important than cover as a limiting factor in the life cycles of our grassland birds, and, just this week, a new synthesis of a huge body of field research in the journal Science lends some credence to that point of view.

Collin Edwards with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, with the help of more than thirty other biologists, reviewed nearly 76,000 surveys of butterflies across the United States.

These researchers found that butterfly abundance dropped by twenty-two percent between 2000 and 2020.

Butterflies have declined in every region of the country.

Populations of most species have declined.

Species richness has declined. [ii]

Some species, like the beloved monarch, are threatened with extinction.[iii]

Many years ago, some now-forgotten biologist in the Rocky Mountain West considered the long-term decline in the region’s mule deer population and observed that “nothing we’ve done on the landscape in the last eighty years has been good for mule deer.”  Much the same could be said of many, even most, wildlife species.

It certainly applies to butterflies.  For more than four centuries, we’ve looked for ways to get rid of them. Sixty years ago, we invented sprays like chlorpyrifos and pyrethrins that have been staples in the battle against insects, and, in the mid-1990s, a new class of particularly effective insecticides called neonicotinoids were introduced in the U.S.  The first of the group, imidacloprid, was permitted for use on crops from soybeans to safflower in 1994.[iv][v]  In 1999, the EPA permitted another neonic, thiamethoxam, for use on wheat and sorghum.[vi]  Clothianidin was permitted for use on corn and canola in 2003.[vii]  Dinotefuran was permitted for use on a variety of crops in 2004.[viii]  All of them deadly to nearly any invertebrate, including beetles, ants, thrips, fleas, ticks, bees . . . and butterflies.

Through the last half of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, we’ve also whittled away at the places butterflies and other insects live and reproduce.  Urban and exurban sprawl has turned large swaths of former habitat into bluegrass deserts, and widespread applications of highly effective herbicides like glyphosate have killed off many of the pesky broad-leafed “weeds” on farmland, reducing the food supply and shelter for many insects, including butterflies.

And we’re not-so-slowly turning up the continental thermostat.  The Edwards study and other smaller-scale research has shown that the warming, drying trend in the western U.S. is not good for butterflies.  Climate change is changing entire ecosystems.

Why, you may ask, does an upland bird hunter like me care about butterflies?  Well, I like them.  I’ve admired them since I was a kid, along with the wildflowers they frequent.  The world would be a poorer place without butterflies and the native plants that support them.

And, as an ecologist, I strongly suspect that the trend in butterflies reflects a much broader trend in the world of arthropods, all those creepy crawlies that provide the foundation of life on dry land across most of the globe.  Studies of the food habits of all our game birds show that rapidly growing youngsters require a high-protein diet, which is to say, bugs.  Pheasant chicks tend to prefer large species of leafhoppers, aphids, and beetles; young quail leaned more toward ants, small caterpillars, and skippers.[ix]  If bugs are hard to come by, parent birds are forced to lead their broods farther and farther afield— the more movement, the more likely chicks will be separated from the brood and lost, the more likely a predator will find the brood and kill some or all of them.  If there are no bugs, young birds quickly weaken; they don’t grow properly and may simply starve to death.

The youngsters slowly wean themselves off insects as they reach adulthood and the first frosts cut the supply of bugs, but the shift to a vegetarian diet doesn’t mean they’re suddenly flush with provisions.  These days, the crop fields that once provided plenty of waste grain are swept clean.  Like most other equipment in this technological age, mechanical combines have improved drastically since they were introduced in the late 1950s.  Around 1970, researchers in Iowa found that the typical combine lost 3.7 bushels per acre of corn harvested— some lost as much as 23 bushels per acre.[x]  This at a time when average corn yield hovered between seventy and eighty bushels per acre.[xi] [xii]

The use of new hybrids, nitrogen fertilizer, and efficient pesticides has boosted average yield of corn to nearly 180 bushels per acre,[xiii] but much less of the grain is lost during harvest.  According to one study in central Nebraska, the amount of corn lying in the fields on either side of the Platte River after harvest dropped 24 to 47 percent in the twenty years between 1978 and 1998.[xiv]  In many areas, farmers stretch electric fence around their cornfields after harvest and turn cattle loose to clean up anything of nutritional value that’s left after the combine goes through.  By the time the cattle are finished, there’s no food or cover left for wildlife.

One other trend in farming has also taken a toll of pheasants and other birds in farm country— the advent of soybeans.  Until World War II, small grains like oats, barley, and rye were commonly planted crops.  In the decades following the war, the acreage of soybeans grew steadily, mostly by replacing the small grains.  Pheasants should like soybeans— they’re full of protein— but neither pheasants nor native game birds like bobwhite quail, prairie chickens, sharptailed grouse, most waterfowl, and sandhill cranes care much for them.  In 1950, farmers harvested about 15 million acres of soybeans in the U.S.  In 2020, they harvested 82 million acres.[xv]  The soybean not only falls short as a food item for birds, but soybean fields also fail to provide much shelter in the winter when wildlife needs shelter most— in January, a harvested Iowa soybean field offers less food and cover for wildlife than the typical Walmart parking lot.

With all these changes, it’s not surprising that the population curves for pheasants and butterflies are strikingly similar, and there’s every reason to believe that the similarity stretches back to the beginning of pesticide use in the U.S.  A classic paper from biologists in Illinois found that survival of pheasant chicks during their first six weeks of life declined by almost 50 percent from 1946 to 1996.[xvi]  The results from the butterfly study suggest that this decline has probably continued, if at a slower rate, through the first decades of the twenty-first century.

No wonder the dogs and I aren’t seeing as many pheasants as we did thirty years ago.

So the comment about mule deer in the West keeps ringing in my head.  Of course, we have done one thing for pheasants— the conservation title of the modern Farm Bill.  It has slowed the loss to a trickle, but, with every new version, the acreage ceiling for the various programs is cut, and the funding reduced to a point where it can’t begin to compete with the income to be had from a corn-soybean rotation.  We further exacerbate the situation by continuing a handsome tax break for corn-based ethanol, a commodity that was supposed to stand on its own in the market but seems to fall short of that promise without a massive federal subsidy.

CRP, as it exists today, isn’t enough to sustain populations of game birds and the rich guilds of other grassland birds in America’s agricultural heartland.  Nor is it enough, in its current form, to stop the loss of butterflies.

When I was first learning the science of ecology and the art of wildlife management in the 1970s, experience had shown that, in farm country, the key to improving wildlife habitat was providing more cover.  There was plenty of winter food scattered across the grain fields; wildlife managers mostly needed to provide cover for nesting, brood-rearing, and winter shelter.  In the 1960s, the success of the Soil Bank program as a way of increasing wildlife populations in general and pheasant numbers in particular demonstrated the importance of cover on the farm landscape of that era.

Two generations of advances in ag technology and chemistry have shifted that equation.  Birds on the prairies and plains could certainly use more cover— they could also use more food.  A return to a 40-million-acre cap on CRP— the ceiling for the program when it was first established— would provide much needed cover and, if we used a wide variety of plants on those retired acres, we could encourage the insects that are the prime groceries for young birds as they grow and adults as they molt into new feathers.

That would help fill the larder during the summer.  When fall and winter come around, we may need to broaden our notion of adequate habitat.  On the modern farm landscape, that almost certainly means providing year-round sources of food along with cover— the birds need extensive food plots to replace the waste grain that has all but disappeared from most working farms.

Once upon a time, wildlife habitat in the uplands of corn and wheat country happened largely by accident as the limitations of equipment and the demands of the markets combined to create a mosaic that benefitted people and wildlife.  We’ve drifted away from that situation and find ourselves faced with the hard reality that we’ll have to pay for the habitat and wildlife we once had almost for free.

I’m sure there are many Americans who don’t share the passion my Brittanies and I have for sharptails and quail and pheasants.  I hope those people find another way to understand the situation and the ways it affects them.  Maybe the Edwards butterfly study will help.  It’s one more indication that the trouble in farm country reaches far beyond game birds.

The litany of loss is daunting: Eastern meadowlarks sang from every third fencepost when I was growing up in Iowa— their population has declined by two-thirds since the 1960s.  Same with the bobolink.  And the eastern kingbird.  And the horned lark.  The lark bunting, once the most common bird along the backroads of the High Plains, has declined by 72 percent.  Numbers of barn swallows have dropped by ninety percent.[xvii] [xviii]  A recent study estimated that the grasslands have lost 700 million breeding birds from thirty-one species since 1970— these researchers reported that three-fourths of grassland bird species are in decline.[xix]

We started out to make a garden, but, somewhere, we went wrong.  We’re well along in the process of turning one of the world’s richest landscapes into a factory.  And, when, at the end of the long day of work, we step away from the machinery that converts land into money, we lie down next to the conveyor belts, looking for rest and respite— and find none.  As I walk behind the dogs, the stillness in the cover sinks into my bones.  No pheasant beds, no coyote tracks, not even a junco in the kochia.  And I wonder how we’ve come to this pass.  This is no way to treat a place we call home.  There must be a better way.

There must be a better way.

 

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[i]  O’Connor, Bryan and Jeffrey J. Lusk, 2024.  2024 rural mail carrier survey.  Nebraska Game and Parks Department Research, Analysis, and Inventory Section Unit Report Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Project W-15-R.  https://outdoornebraska.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2024-JULY-RMCS-REPORT.pdf

[ii] Edwards, Collin B., et al, 2025.  Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the twenty-first century.  Science 387: 1090-1094.  https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adp4671.

 [iii] U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 2024.  Endangered and threatened wildlife and plants: threatened species status with Section 4(d) rule for monarch butterfly and designation of critical habitat.  Federal Register 89(239): 100662-100716.  December 12, 2024.

https://www.fws.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-12/threatened-species-status-with-section-4-d-rule-for-monarch-butterfly-and-designation-of-critical-habitat_0.pdf

 [iv] Robinson, Ayanna, nd.  Fact sheet: Understanding neonicotinoids.  Growing Matters. https://growingmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/fact-sheet-understanding-neonicotinoids2.pdf

 [v]  Anon, nd.  Imidacloprid.  Xerces Society.  https://xerces.org/systemic-insecticides/imidacloprid

 [vi] Keigwin, Richard P., Jr. and Joan Harrigan-Farrelly, 2011.  Thiamethoxam summary document registration review: initial docket December 2011.  Environmental Protection Agency, Docket Number: EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0581.   file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0581-0002_content.pdf

 [vii]  Kenny, Daniel C., 2003.  Pesticide fact sheet: Name of chemical: Clothianidin; reason for issuance: conditional registration; date issued: May 30, 2003.  Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C. https://web.archive.org/web/20140326133528/http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/chem_search/reg_actions/registration/fs_PC-044309_30-May-03.pdf

 [viii]  Keigwin, Richard P., Jr., 2011.  Dinotefuran summary document registration review: initial docket: December 2011.  Environmental Protection Agency Case No. 7441, Washington, D.C. file:///Users/chrismadson/Downloads/EPA-HQ-OPP-2011-0920-0002_content.pdf

 [ix] Doxon, Elizabeth D. and John P. Carroll, 2010.  Feeding ecology of ring-necked pheasant and northern bobwhite quail chicks in Conservation Reserve Program fields.  Journal of Wildlife Management 74(2): 249-256. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27760446.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A9a2f6cb43c7ddc222138862c4a5bbca8&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&initiator=search-results&acceptTC=1

 [x] Hanna, Mark H., 2010.  Combine harvest setting to reduce grain loss and improve grain quality.  2010 Integrated Crop Management Conference, Iowa State University, Ames, IA. https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/319c47e5-906d-42d1-bef5-64af32baac13/content

[xi] Anon, nd.  Corn yield, 1970.  National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA.  https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/1DF2A72F-C8DC-3CB9-8008-2E0966514207

[xii] Nielsen, R.L., 2023.  Historical corn grain yields in the U.S.  Corny News Network, Purdue University.  https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html

[xiii]  Anon, 2025.  Corn yield, United States.  USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service.  https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/Field_Crops/cornyld.php

[xiv] Krapu, Gary L., et al., 2004.  Less waste corn, more land in soybeans, and the switch to genetically modified crops: trends with important implications for wildlife management.  Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(1): 127-136.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3784550.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A4d60f6ece2fa9d2420a76884afc2f2a5&ab_segments=&initiator=&acceptTC=1

[xv] National Agricultural Statistics Service.  https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/823B649C-6769-386B-BBD6-7F641DF4984A

[xvi] Warner, Richard E., et al., 1999.  Declining survival of ring-necked pheasant chicks in Illinois during the late 1900s.  Journal of Wildlife Management 63(2): 705-710.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3802660.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A9a2f6cb43c7ddc222138862c4a5bbca8&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&initiator=search-results&acceptTC=1

[xvii] U.S. Geological Survey, nd.  BBS trends 1966-2022.  https://eesc.usgs.gov/MBR/

[xviii] Heisman, Rebecca, 2023.  Prairie plight: five of the fastest declining grassland birds in the U.S.  American Bird Conservancy.

Prairie Plight: Five of the Fastest Declining Grassland Birds in the U.S.

 

[xix] Rosenberg, Kenneth V., et al., 2019.  Decline of North American avifauna.  Science 366: 120-124.  https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.aaw1313