MADELIA — 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.

Madsen said the idea of Pheasant Phest was hatched between the Chamber of Commerce and the City. The idea of the celebration quickly was embraced by local businesses, the Watonwan Game and Fish Club, and the local Pheasants Forever Chapter.

On Friday night, there was a trap shoot followed by a kick-off dinner and dance.

On Saturday, prior to the 9 a.m. opener, members of the Madelia fire department were serving pancakes and sausage to orange-clad hunters.

One of them was 73-year-old Willard Kormann, who was planning to open the season on his son-in-law’s farm west of Madelia with his son, Curt, and neighbor, Tom Huber.

Old enough to remember the best of pheasant hunting days, he said he can recall all the traffic, the filled hotels, and mindful of the lagging crop harvest this year that would make finding birds very difficult, cornfields short enough to hunt over.

“You could see to shoot over the corn back then but now, you can’t even see the sky,” he said.

Well before the 9 a.m. opener, a contingent of hunters including Madsen, representatives of the Watonwan Game and Fish Club and Pheasants Forever, along with outdoor show host Bill Schreck of Ron Schara Productions and a camera man, traveled to a Wildlife Management Area south of Madelia.

The WMA ironically once was one of two major pheasant raising facilities operated by the Minnesota Department of Game and Fish. (See accompanying box.)

After following several roaming hunting dogs for the length of the unit that was surrounded by corn, except for a couple of deer and several hen pheasants and a lone rooster that flushed wild, nary a shot was fired.

On the next parcel, a private piece of Conservation Reserve Program land that was largely isolated from standing corn, things were better. Three roosters were bagged by noon.

By most measures, it was hardly stellar hunting.

But most in the party agreed that hunting success was certain to improve as crops come out.

And besides, even though Madelia’s festivities to honor the pheasant concluded last night with a Sportsman’s Dinner at the local VFW followed by another dance, Minnesota’s 2009 pheasant hunting season will run through Jan. 3, 2010.

From a hunter’s view point, that’s 85 more days to celebrate the Minnesota ringneck.