"Stamp sales in 2006 were the second-highest they have ever been," Penning said. "There were 129,291 pheasant stamps sold last year. It directly correlates to the predictions on how many pheasants we think there are going to be and what people are seeing in the field."

Does this mean more birds killed? It does, according to Penning.

"To a certain extent, the more hunting pressure there is, the more birds that get harvested," he said. "It's a linear relationship. In 2005, we sold 117,000 stamps, so we exceeded that by 12,000 stamps last year, and in 2005, we harvested 586,000 pheasants. The 2006 harvest numbers are not in yet, but I would expect it will be in that neighborhood. We may exceed it a bit, but I would say the pheasant hunting between 2005 and 2006 was pretty comparable. It was good hunting."

How good was it? My son, Jason, and I headed out to Hutchinson one beautiful day last fall to knock on some doors and catch up with some old friends where we hunted in the past. I enjoy sitting around at the kitchen table swapping stories with the landowners, with the smell of a fresh pot of coffee filling the room. Jason, on the other hand, likes to say hi, hunt, and then come back for some small talk. He's his mother's son.

At the first farm we stopped, I told Jason to check out the pheasant cover while I chatted with the landowner. Ten minutes later, he was back with his two roosters. I didn't even hunt this location because I wanted to check in with some of our other contacts. As it turned out, I finally took to the cover after a hearty lunch and had my two pheasants in 45 minutes. Jason made a good dog on that hunt. He flushed my birds and I only told him he could shoot to back me up. It wasn't necessary. Four roosters, four shots.

One has to wonder how long this great pheasant hunting will last. According to Penning, the ethanol equation is going to have a bearing on whether we continue to feast or enter a famine.

That was but a primer for the season. On a trip to hunt roosters in Iowa, Jason and I decided to scout some public land west and south of Albert Lea on the way down. Jason typically turns his nose up at public land, preferring instead to get permission from landowners. I like WMAs because you can park, hop out and hunt when you are in a hurry. You just use the WMA for a stop off to pick up some bonus birds, and it's quick and dirty. With luck some day, the powers that be in Minnesota might work out setting up some walk-in hunting areas like they have in South Dakota where we won't have to ask permission to access certain parcels of private property. Maybe some day.

Our first stop was the Walnut Lake WMA. There is plenty of grassy cover there, some lowland swamp and some timber belts. There was plenty of cover for pheasants, but it was a few weeks into the season and you could tell hunters had been there by the number of empty plastic shotgun hulls strewn about. I can't resist picking these up, and there were over 30 in my vest when we got back to the truck. There would have been plenty more I'm sure, but we weren't there more than an hour. We didn't even get to uncase our guns at the Panicum Prairie WMA because we had our four roosters when we left Walnut Lake.

It was a brag fest on the way down to east/central Iowa, and I was on the listening end. Ten steps into the WMA and three hens and two roosters flushed. Jason dropped the first rooster before it got 10 wingbeats. The other was surrounded by the hens and he had to wait a couple of seconds until the birds separated some before taking a long shot and dropping that second bird. Fifty minutes later and after flushing half a dozen hens, another rooster came up in range and Jason only needed one shot to drop that bird. As the dog was running to pick up the third rooster, it flushed another by accident and Jason shot that one, too. It was a long trip for me.

One has to wonder how long this great pheasant hunting will last. According to Penning, the ethanol equation is going to have a bearing on whether we continue to feast or enter a famine.

"The ethanol thing could go either way," Penning said. "There could be some benefits from it if it's done right. If we can shift the argument toward more cellulose energy -- biofuels made from grass -- that could be a very good thing.

"That technology is not commercially available yet," Penning continued. "So, in the short term we're going to see more land go to corn. The question is: What land will that be? It may be bean ground that is planted in corn. Farmers may just take their existing operations and just shuffle around what they're planting. At the same time, there is a push to release some CRP, or to reduce enrollment in CRP. If that happens, we'll start seeing a significant impact on wildlife populations."