Species Highlight: Ring-necked Pheasant
Ring-necked Pheasant
Ring-necked pheasants evolved in Asia over the course of human history to thrive around agriculture. When Judge Owen Denney, U.S. Consul General to Shanghai, China, arranged in 1881 to have a shipment of pheasants trapped near Shanghai, to be released in the Willamette Valley, the pheasants found near perfect habitat in the primitive patchwork of agriculture and weedy hedgerows. The success of Oregon’s pheasants triggered similar efforts across North America as hunters experienced the thrill of pursuing this spectacular game bird.
Pheasant populations would rise and fall with U.S. foreign policy and geopolitical events. World War I caused a boom in wheat production across the West, but grain prices collapsed after the war. Farmers walked away from cultivated land, intensifying the effects of drought, leading to the Dust Bowl. Pheasant populations crashed as millions of acres of agriculture eroded in the wind. The creation of the Soil Conservation Service in 1935, now the NRCS, improved soil conservation practices, and pheasants responded.
World War II again increased demand for cereal grains, with farmers now incorporating toxic herbicides, insecticides, and chemical fertilizers, all to the detriment of pheasant populations. After the war when demand again fell, the NRCS responded with programs designed to remove grain fields from production, leading to a pheasant heyday in the U.S. with populations peaking in the 1950s through the 1970s.
In 1973, the U.S. made a huge grain export deal with the Soviet Union, prompting farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow”, and causing pheasant populations to predictably decline with the lack of escape, nesting, and brooding cover. One year later, OPEC embargoed oil exports to the U.S. due to the Yom Kippur War, causing fuel prices to spike. By 1976, a U.S. embargo on grain exports to the Soviet Union in response to their invasion of Afghanistan caused grain prices to plummet. Pheasants responded to the less intensive agriculture in great numbers.
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) was first created by the 1985 Farm Bill to stabilize commodity prices and was quickly recognized for improving wildlife habitat, including pheasants. The program incentivizes farmers to replant formerly cropped, marginal land back into perennial cover.
After a turbulent century, today’s farmers have learned to be very efficient to manage risk. Large field sizes and intense weed control maximize crop values but remove important perennial habitats and field edges. Improvements in irrigation efficiency have eliminated many grassy and weedy areas critical to pheasant production.
Some farming improvements have benefitted pheasants, such as the development of no-till farming. New cold-tolerant varieties of winter wheat can provide ground cover high enough for nesting and brood rearing much sooner than spring wheat. The development of machinery that allows harvest of wheat while leaving taller stubble means better cover after harvest.
Oregon’s fertile Willamette Valley, once the core of the state’s pheasant populations, became a bastion of grass seed production beginning in the mid-1980s, replacing wheat and other cereal grains. This landscape-level change led to the near collapse of western Oregon pheasants. Pheasants still thrive in eastern Oregon, primarily in the Columbia Basin and other places where they have access to edges of wetlands, crops, grasslands, and weedy ditches and fencerows.
While pheasant populations may have good years and bad years, two rules seem to hold true. First, more habitat equals more pheasants. Second, pheasants occupy an important place in the heart of the American upland game bird hunter.
Despite their status as an introduced species, pheasants are a powerful engine for conservation, from non-profit sporting organizations such as Pheasants Forever, to the highest level of policymakers driving Farm Bill conservation programs. The strong desire to see and pursue this beautiful game bird has motivated generations to conserve and create wildlife habitat while bringing economic benefit to rural communities. Pheasants are truly a “flagship” species in our agricultural ecosystems helping other species benefit from the habitat conserved on their behalf.
