Along with those all too brief days of my spring turkey hunting seasons, this is the time of the year when I pay close attention to weather patterns.

As a pheasant hunter, I can’t help myself.

After all, warm, dry, weather in May and June bodes well for a mama pheasant bringing off a healthy brood and the potential for a good ringneck hunting come fall.

By contrast, a damp, cool spring does not.

Over the last 20 years or so, we’ve had some good nesting seasons, we’ve had some bad ones.

But good weather or bad, a critical factor in the reproductive success of the upland bird always is the availability of suitable nesting cover.

Since the mid-1980s, undisturbed grassland provided by the Conservation Reserve Program has meant that even in bad nesting seasons, a level of reproduction has been achieved that has prevented the fall pheasant seasons from being disasters.

By contrast, during the 1970s and into the ’80s, without the benefit of CRP acres and thanks to annual land retirement programs like set-aside that were counterproductive to upland bird reproduction, we had some truly unmemorable fall pheasant populations, good spring nesting or not.

In recent years however, we’ve had some pretty good bird hunting, thanks to the combination of good over-winter survival, decent nesting conditions and the existence of CRP lands.

But seasons like those now seem to be destined to become little more than pleasant memories.

Congress might like to crow about the conservation measures of the recently passed 2008 Farm Bill, but the core of the conservation part of the bill — the Conservation Reserve Program — is living on borrowed time.

While it’s true the new legislation includes funding for 32 million acres of CRP, that represents a 7 million acre cut from the previous 39 million-acre level.

But inclusion of CRP in the new farm legislation is something of a farce, anyhow. That’s because the payment schedule offered to farmers to enroll their land into the conservation program can’t begin to approach the kind of monetary return that corn can yield.

The numbers aren’t very encouraging: In North Dakota, some 420,000 acres of CRP were plowed under in 2007. South Dakota lost 300,000 acres last year with contracts for another 300,000 acres slated to expire by 2010.

Minnesota lost 80,000 acres of CRP in 2007 with contracts for another 270,000 acres expiring by 2010. Iowa lost 128,000 acres of CRP last year and will lose another 256,000 acres by 2010.