Signs along Highway 60 boast to passing motorists that Madelia is the “Pride of the Prairie.”

But this past weekend, the community located 25 miles southwest of Mankato was calling itself “Pheasant Capitol of Minnesota.”

Seriously.

Well, then maybe not so seriously.

“That was kind of tongue-in-cheek,” city manager Dan Madsen admitted of the claim.

The boast was just part of the community’s Pheasant Phest ’09, a weekend celebration timed to the Saturday opening of the Minnesota pheasant hunting season to call attention to rich tradition and culture of pheasant hunting in the area.

Courtney Hennis, executive director of the local Chamber of Commerce concurred.

“It’s not just about the birds,” she said. “Some people laughed at us because everybody knows the most birds are out west.

“But Madelia is a gateway to the hunting that is all around us, a good place to stop and go out one direction to hunt, come back and eat, and then go out the other direction.”

Historically, Madelia indeed was a destination for pheasant hunters in the halcyon days of the ringneck.

“Locals talked about what used to be when there were hotels booked for weeks and months in advance for the pheasant season,” Madsen said.

In the 1950s through the early 1960s, traffic jams were not uncommon as out-of-town hunters converged on Madelia and other southern Minnesota communities on opening weekend.

Annual harvests of a million birds in comparatively short 30-day hunting seasons were not uncommon.

But as farming methods changed and federal soil retirement programs were discontinued, all exacerbated by a series of severe winters, by the late 1960s, annual harvests had plummeted to as few as 141,000 birds in an abbreviated 9-day season in 1967. In 1969, there was no pheasant season at all.

Since then, pheasant numbers along with corresponding pheasant hunters has ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of farm programs and the weather.