Suddenly, there it was. Parading across our front pasture within 20 metres of our front door like it owned the place. With a distinctive cocky strut, long skinny neck and head held high on a tall plump body this female Ring Necked Pheasant emerged out of the protective cover of the Maitland River Valley to complete exposure to every winter predator imaginable in this part of the world.
This hen was lovely and healthy looking but obviously on a mission to cross the open ground as quickly as possible probably in search of food which is one of the few things to bring them out into the open sometimes as far as a full kilometre from the protection offered by dense cover. Living out their lives in a home range of about three square kilometres pheasants require both horizontal and vertical cover for protection from land and aerial predators, along with nesting and winter cover, brood habitat and of course adequate food sources all within about a 50 acre patch of land.
Ring necked Pheasants are a bit of a bizarre creature belonging to the upland game bird family of birds which include Turkeys and Grouse. They are ground dwelling and often considered chicken like in appearance and activity. These are not native birds but instead were successfully imported into North America back in the 1880s by Judge Owen Nickerson Denny who was the US consul to China at the time. These birds are native to that land and the judge shipped 30 birds to his home in Oregon, 26 of which survived the trip. A mere 11 years later Oregon opened a 75 day season on the birds and hunters bagged 50,000 pheasants! They have since been released throughout North America reaching all time population highs in the mid 1900s before suffering severe population declines. Pheasants thrive in farm landscapes with at least one-fifth of it being undisturbed grasslands. Habitat destruction is the mainly blamed for the birds decline.
Winter survival for Ring Necks can be a tricky venture. The plentiful cover that summer grasses and fall stubble provides get quickly buried in winter’s blowing snow. Birds then tend to concentrate in areas of heavy roosting cover quickly depleting local foods sources. This forces them to venture further and further from that protective cover each day like the hen that passed through our property on Easter Sunday. The hens have the added burden of needing to gain weight over the winter to replenish all that was lost during the last nesting season where they lay an average of 11 eggs. Lots of stresses over the winter means many hens don’t survive the following spring during nesting season which turns out to be the time of highest mortality. Studies have shown a strong correlation between high spring body weight and successful chick production.
During breeding season a single male has been known to guard a group of hens from other males in a practice known as harem defence polygyny. The young, when they hatch out, are up and running immediately actively foraging around the nest site. These precocial young require the hen only for protection and guidance not for food.
Ring Necked Pheasants were obviously introduced for hunting and in a sense are well adapted to the pressure of a regular cull. The birds are sexually dimorphic, that is the males are distinctly different than the females even from a distance and given the males polygamous habits, hunting only males and avoiding the hens ensures greater chances of the population surviving.
Although not a native bird, like many introduced species they have become a part of our rural environment and it looks like they’re here to stay.
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