Pheasant - Invasive Species or Valuable Game Bird?

[Mike rossi]

http://thebirdhuntingsociety.weebly....-gamebird.html

[Art Eatman]

They've been here long enough to have enabled scientific knowledge/proof to show they're no harm to the populated areas.

Purely an anti-hunting political agenda effort to cause trouble.

[Colorado Redneck]

For the life of me, it is baffling why the State of Colorado does not promote pheasant stocking. There used to be enough pheasant to make hunting worth while in northeastern Colorado. Now, the only time I see one is near one of the few hunting organizations that raise their own birds and release a few for hunters. Going pheasant hunting where I live is like fishing in the bath tub.

[Mobuck]

Years ago there was rumor going around that pheasants killed quail chicks. Oddly enough in the mid to late 80's we had more quail and pheasants than ever and the birds were well mixed within the cover.
The state of Missouri has lost nearly all the game birds. The bunny cops say it's loss of habitat but I say it's predation and loss of food(specifically grain fields). Row crops are coming back due to higher profit potential so we can only hope the game birds can make a come-back also.

[Gunplummer]

Pennsylvania used to be LOADED with wild pheasants. Efforts to re-establish them just keep failing. I remember how they disappeared in a matter of 3-4 years. At the same time there was an outbreak of Oriental bird flue and millions of chickens were slaughtered to try and stop it. I blame that mostly.
Now there are so many things against them that it is a waste of money to try restocking. You can't drive down a highway without seeing hawks sitting in trees all over. Few people hunt small game anymore compared to 40 years ago. I used to trap fox and over half of them had pellets in their butt, fresh and healed over. That took out a lot of fox in my area. Kids aren't trapping possem and skunks anymore, and they are real nest robbers.
Stocked birds now are really stupid. One guy that raises them for clubs told me he has to incubate the eggs because the hens won't even sit on them anymore. I was sitting on a steep wooded hill bowhunting one day. I heard some shooting down in the swamp, and all of a sudden there were big, brown birds dropping around me and running in circles. The stocked birds were too dumb to fly in the woods and were hitting the branches and dropping. When I was a kid, the cockbirds were as smart as turkeys. IMO it is a lost cause trying to bring them back in this state.

[T. O'Heir]

Shortage is very likely due to the explosion in the coyote population. Pheasants being ground nesters.

[TimSr]

I'm with Gunplummer. I've seen the decline follow the decline of trapping and the PCness of wearing fur, long before the coyote explosion which could only make it worse. The racoon populations exploded quickly with the decline of trapping and coon hunting. Coon, Fox, possum, skunk, weasel, and all kinds of criters enjoy an easy meal on eggs or chicks in a nest on the ground. Apparently nests of newborn rabbits were just as easy, because the pheasnt/quail decline was followed with the rabbit decline. The coyote explosion came in this area 20 years after, and more resulted in the decline of other predators and scavengers they competed with for food, than the food itself.

[Gunplummer]

Yes. I lived in farm country when I was a kid, and coyotes or their tracks were unheard of there (Not now). As the small working farms were bought up and became horse farms, there was more land sitting for nesting sites than in the pheasant heyday. I have to agree, pesticides were probably hard on them. Some of the seed corn planted now has a coating on it that will do in a crow if it pulls a sprout out to eat it.

[Mobuck]

" Some of the seed corn planted now has a coating on it that will do in a crow if it pulls a sprout out to eat it"
To the best of my knowledge that statement is incorrect.
Seed corn has a coating that prevents it being damaged by worms and beetles but not crows. I've seen fields where turkeys went right down the row picking up the improperly covered seed and didn't see any dead turkeys. I've also seen where raccoons have eaten several pounds of seed w/o finding a dead one anywhere around.

[lamarw]

Pheasants think the German Shorthaired Pointer is the Invasive Species.

[Gunplummer]

I may be wrong, maybe they had West Nile viris. Seemed awful unusual to me.

[RodTheWrench]

By definition, an invasive species either destroys other animals or habitat for those native animals, neither of which the Chinese Ring-necked Pheasant does.

[Gunplummer]

PA has a much bigger problem with invasive plants, but that is not cool enough to protest.

[Blindstitch]

I don't know about you but I plan on doing my part at reducing the threat from season open to season close. 3 months till opening here in Wisconsin.

[buck460XVR]

This is the definition of an Invasive Species.......

"An invasive species is defined as an organism (plant, animal, fungus, or bacterium) that is not native and has negative effects on our economy, our environment, or our health. "

This is not true of the Ring-neck Pheasant. Pretty simple, even for the simple minded. The last part of that definition is true of the Ring-neck Pheasant.

"Not all introduced species are invasive."

[kilimanjaro]

They're not exactly the Kudzu of the Plains or Flying Boa Constrictors, if you want more of them, give them habitat.

[Hunter Customs]

The state of Missouri has lost nearly all the game birds. The bunny cops say it's loss of habitat but I say it's predation and loss of food(specifically grain fields). Row crops are coming back due to higher profit potential so we can only hope the game birds can make a come-back also.

It is partly due to the lost of habitat, the land rappers (large operation row croppers) rip out every hedge row in the country so they can plant grader ditch to grader ditch, we have never had a shortage of row crops in my part of Missouri.
Along with that I'm sure all the chemicals being used for planting and spraying is not doing the bird population any good.

Turkeys eat quail chicks, I've seen them do it and the cock pheasants do tear up quail nest and eat the eggs.

An older gentleman I knew who happen to be a quail hunter his whole life (until age 92) told me that if you get a large population of pheasants your quail will move out, I actually witnessed that first hand.

[jdscholer]

Our pheasant population pretty much disappeared when they started planting more pheasants.

My theory is that they contaminated the genetic strain that did well in the wild, with big, dumb birds that are easy to raise in captivity.

We have all the same predators that we used to have, and mostly the same habitat, what we don't have is a wild pheasant population. jd

[dahermit]

It has been my understanding that during the heyday of large pheasant populations, no-till farming had not taken over yet. It was said that pheasants did not do well in "clean" corn fields...the weed seeds between the rows sustained them...the weeds that were there when corn had to be cultivated to keep the weeds down. With modern farming methods, there are no weeds and a clean field of corn may as well be a desert as far as the Pheasants are concerned. In my own instance, when I moved to the country (Southern Michigan), in 2000 there were both pheasants and quail, and no-till was already widely practiced on the adjacent farm lands. So, I cannot attest that it is no-till that has whiped them out, but I do know they are gone.

[steveno]

late winter heavy snow and heavy spring rain doesn't do the quail or pheasants any good either. the farmers are out in the field right after harvest and turning everything under so there isn't as much cover when winter does come around. I'm not even going to mention the other animals that feed on the quail and pheasants

[Sure Shot Mc Gee]

When those who condemn start buying licenses to support such game & its habitat their words won't fall upon a listing audience. Up until they do.
"Get to walking Chumley's !! "

[wild willy]

jdscholer I'am from Pa when I was growing up (60s +70s) we were loaded with birds. I too think the Game Commision here stocked infected birds the population crashed in a couple years.At that time no major changes in farming methods from years before.The only thing thats certain is no government agency will ever admit to making a mistake.

[jdscholer]

We used to have a very successful wild bird population. Every season we killed probably 98% of the roosters, (hens are off limits). The next year we would have another crop of new roosters and hens, sometimes even two hatches.

We've always had high predator populations; hawks, skunks, coons, coyotes, feral cats, etc.. That hasn't changed. Always had and still have pretty vast areas of habitat and refuges with no farming; that hasn't changed.

What has changed is that for several years now the organizations that stock birds have been stocking birds that are huge, dumb, chicken-like creatures that don't seem able to survive in the wild. You may see pheasants in residential areas where no hunting is possible, but you seldom see them in wild areas where they used to be. Wild hens are pretty much non-existent, and they have never been legal to shoot.

I've lived in this area all my life, and it seems that more stocking = less pheasants. And believe me, this isn't a popular theory to present to most folks who belong to Pheasants Unlimited. jd

[Boncrayon]

Most probably in which State you would find the game bird! If the general public is against all game hunting, they would consider the animals' safety. If it is in a State that protects its natural species, and trains its youth to respect the Wildlife and Fisheries' goals of controlling the species for future hunters, the Pheasant would be a valuable game bird. Always great in a Dutch Oven with cut potatoes, carrots and celery!

[mquail]

Hen pheasants do practice egg dumping in other bird's nests. I've found pheasant eggs in mallard nests and seen grouse and partridge raising pheasant chicks. So yes they do interact with native species except the Hungarian partridge weren't native species but the greater prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse were. I don't think pheasant egg dumping is going to wipe out healthy populations of chickens or sharp-tails but as the article suggests they could create problems for remnant populations http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/docu...et_al_1998.pdf