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count numbers jump by more than 71 percent to 1.93 pheasants-per-mile this year. Fields around Watertown and Aberdeen are seeing 50-percent jumps.
• The increases are more tempered in the central part of the state, where a dry spring failed to produce the new spring grass growth the birds like for nesting.
• Outdoor enthusiasts said the short-term trends are great, but they worry that a continued decrease in land enrolled in the federal Conservation Reserve Program could pose a longer-term threat. The voluntary program encourages farmers and ranchers to enter into multi-year contracts with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to plant vegetation cover suited for wildlife.
• Runia said some 225,000 acres of CRP in the state expired Aug. 1, and most of that acreage will be plowed in late fall or the spring for crop production.
• And in August, the U.S. Agriculture Department approved emergency haying and grazing on additional CRP land in an effort to help drought-stricken farmers and ranchers who needed livestock feed.
• The USDA emergency order came after the pheasant hens' main nesting season, so the cut CRP hay shouldn't negatively affect this year's population, Runia said.
• "But we might see a little bit of an effect next year," he said.
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• PINE RIDGE, S.D. (AP) -- A South Dakota man has been sentenced to three months in prison for possessing alcohol on the dry Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
• U.S. Attorney Brendan Johnson announced Wednesday that 57-year-old Darrell Spotted Elk, Sr., of Pine Ridge, was sentenced Monday on a charge of unlawfully possessing intoxicants in Indian Country.
• Prosecutors say Spotted Elk possessed and sold liquor to someone on the reservation on Dec. 31, 2011. He pleaded guilty to the charge in June.
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