West Fork Prairie seems to always be busy during the pheasant season. The roughly 40-acre public wildlife area on the Franklin-Butler County line is small by comparison to its public hunting neighbors, but it seems hunters are always either starting out or wrapping up a hunt here, and the parking lot is never vacant very long.
“It seems to have a following among hunters,” said Justin Clark, wildlife biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Cedar-Wapsi Unit at Big Marsh. “Every time I drive past, it seems someone is either getting ready to hunt it or has just finished. It does hold birds.”
A 16-acre parcel near the parking lot was one of those places that was too-hard-to-farm, so it was a pasture. Part of its old fencing is still there. Walking onto this section, the feel of the ground changes as the elevation decreases going from the familiar firmness to spongy. This former pasture had never been tilled making it one of Iowa’s rarest habitats - remnant prairie.
“It’s different. You can just tell you’re on a remnant prairie,” Clark said. A step or two further and water overtops the shoe. Like many public hunting areas, the field tile under this property had been broken to collect and hold rain and runoff.
In addition to the 16-acre remnant, West Fork Prairie has 21 acres of restored prairie, four acres of savanna and 2-1/2 acres of sorghum as a food plot – planted, of course, outside of the remnant. It was acquired in 2013. The area management is a combination of prescribed fire every five years, cutting trees and spraying sumac.
“It’s too wet to get a vehicle down to burn it in sections so we burn it all at once,” he said.
A heavy dew coats the prairie adding to its wetness. Monarchs are bouncing from flower to flower on this early September morning.
About a half mile to the west/southwest is another small but popular public hunting area, the West Fork Wildlife Area.
The West Fork Wildlife Area is divided into two parcels about a mile and a half apart - the northwest parcel is about 40 acres; the southeast parcel is about 135 acres. Both are easily accessed from parking lots off the gravel road.
“This is another area that has a lot of hunting pressure. It’s a nice complex and manageable to hunt,” Clark said.
The larger of the two West Fork Wildlife Area parcels is restored prairie with about 10 acres of wetlands on the lower areas, and timber on the east side. The West Fork of the Cedar River flows through the adjacent county managed area. A private farm field borders it on the south and a private timbered area to the west.
“The biggest battle is trees from the floodplain encroaching on the prairie. We burn this regularly, sometimes in back to back seasons,” Clark said.
The prairie, wetlands, and riverine timber support a diverse wildlife community and is visited by nearby high school and college students who come for the pheasants and deer. Franklin County has a boat ramp on the West Fork of the Cedar River to access the small, winding river.