The Pheasant Dilemma

A Great Plains perspective on Pennsylvania ring-necks

Special to the Post-Gazette

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — From the crest of a low ridge, the South Dakota plains rolled away like a rumpled quilt. Belts of red, brown and yellow grass, tall and short, flanked ranks of soybeans, corn and wheat. Amid that order, dark splotches of cattail slough claimed low places. Anywhere the eye settled was a jumble of crops, grassand cover.

Walking abreast, four orange-vested hunters followed bird dogs into a swath of wild sunflower. Ring-necked pheasants heard their approach and flushed in waves — dozens, perhaps a hundred, all beyond shotgun range. Later the dogs did point singles where the pheasant waves had alighted, and the huntersdowned a few.

That scene is typical of South Dakota every October. No other state is so inseparably linked to the ring-necked pheasant. According to South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks annual surveys, the state’s pheasant population averages 8.5 million birds each fall, but has peaked at 16 million. Nearly 100,000 visiting hunters from across the United States, plus 60,000 state residents, hunt pheasants in South Dakota, bagging around 1.2 million roostersannually.

The four hunters noted, plus their observer, had traveled west from Pennsylvania, once acclaimed for its own ringneck abundance. During the second in the state’s threetier pheasant season (Dec. 1123 and Dec. 26-Feb. 28), some Pennsylvania sportsmen blame the ringneck crash on predators or hard winters, while Game Commission representatives cite changing farm practices and urbanization of former farmland. Most likely, a combination of factors have made Pennsylvania an inhospitable place for pheasants, relative to the prairies sprawling across Kansas, Nebraska, eastern Montana, Iowa, southern Minnesota and the Dakotas, all robust withringnecks.

Two Great Plains attributes that are tough for Pennsylvania to equal are space and grass. South Dakota’s average human population density is 11 persons per square mile, while 285 people occupy the average Pennsylvania square mile. That alone complicates pheasant management.

Pheasants are a grassland bird, while Pennsylvania is a forest state where anyplace left alone becomes woodland. Grass here must be maintained. According to the U.S. Department. of Agriculture’s “Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2007,” grassland or range covers only 4.2 percent of the land base in the Northeast, and 8.5 percent of the Appalachian region. On the Northern Plains, including South Dakota, grassland occupies39 percent of the surface.

Pheasants, though, like variety in their habitat.

“What’s interesting, and challenging, about pheasants is that they require different habitat elements at different times of year, and they have relatively small home ranges,” said Travis Runia, senior upland game biologist for the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks agency. “They do best when they don’t have to travel to meet seasonal needs for nesting, brood and winter cover, and food. It’s ideal to have about 50 percent food source and 50 percent cover, with grasses being the common thread. Speaking in general terms, we are fortunate to have that over eastern South Dakota for now. That’s why pheasantsthrive here.”

Farmers’ crop selections and how crops are produced also impact the quality of habitat.

“Less wheat and other smallgrains are being planted now than row crops like corn and soybeans,” Runia said. “But wheat fields provide better pheasant habitat than row crops. Corn and soybeans offerpheasants food but nothing else. Years ago, before the surge in herbicide use, when row crop fields were weedier, there wasn’t such a difference in cover. But now, without nearby grass, row crops are not providing habitat anymore.”

Even if South Dakota farmers are producing less small grains relative to row crops, there’s still a lot of wheat on the land. The USDA Census of Agriculture reports that in 2012, South Dakota farmers harvested 4.3 millionacres (26 percent of all cropland) of wheat. In the same year, Pennsylvania farmers harvested 150,000 wheat acres, 4 percent of the 3.9 million-acre cropland total.

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Still, from Runia’s professional perspective, the commondenominator is grass.

“Pheasants are resilient, but they have limits,” Runia said. “What we’ve observed is that [the absence of] idle grasslands are a limiting factor for pheasants. When they don’t have large blocks of undisturbed grass for nesting andbrood habitat, they’ll find somewhereelse to nest — in a road ditch, or a hayfield that will be mowed. They’re less successful than when they nest in large blocks of permanent or semi-permanent grass.”

Expanses of grass habitat also make pheasants less vulnerable to predators, Runia observed.

“When predators search the landscape, they key on edges, ditches or patches of cover to find a nest,” he said. “Think of how human hunters approach this. A ditch is easy to hunt, but a pheasant is tough to find in a 160-acre block of grass. It’s the same withpredators.

“Predation is not so much a problem as a symptom of a problem,” Runia continued. “When you have good habitat, you can still have good pheasant numbers even with predators. But in marginal habitats, predation losses can gothrough the roof.”

Despite South Dakota’s historic success with pheasants, future success is uncertain. The state’s pheasant plan notes that every historic peak in the pheasant population has corresponded with surges of grass cover on the land. It happened in the early 1930s during the Great Depression, and the mid-1940s during World War II. Pheasant numbers peaked in the early 1960s at the height of the USDA Soil Bank Program, in which farmers were paid to retire land from production for 10 years. Most recently in the early 2000s, pheasants boomed again at the peak of the Conservation Reserve Program.

Congress established CRP in the 1985 Farm Bill and farmers everywhere responded to the opportunity. CRP enables landowners to enter into 10- or 15- year contracts with USDA and receive annual rental payments for acres removed from crop production and converted to grass. Thus stabilized, CRP acres prevent soil erosion, maintain water quality and provide critical habitat for pheasants and other wildlife. Most CRP contracts also have a provision for public access forhunting and fishing.

Thirty-seven million acres were enrolled nationwide by the program’s peak in 2007, including1.8 million in South Dakota. But for the past decade, Congress has reduced CRP funding and lowered the cap on enrolled acreage. Millions of CRP-enrolled acres have expired or will expire soon, likely to return to crop production. South Dakota’s enrolled CRP lands have shrunk by half since their pinnacle.

“The recent and future loss of expiring CRP acres is a major concern of wildlife managers on the Northern Great Plains,” states the South Dakota pheasant managementplan.

This same trend threatens potential pheasant habitat in Pennsylvania. By 2022, CRP contracts on 100,000 Pennsylvania acres will expire. Pheasants Forever, a nationwide conservation organization that promotes pheasant habitat through private land stewardship, encourages hunters to urge Congress to restore CRP funding in the 2018Farm Bill.

“The Conservation Reserve Program is the nation’s most successful private lands habitat program ever in existence,” Pheasants Forever public relations manager Jared Wiklund wrote in a recent commentary.

Another possible factor in Pennsylvania’s pheasant dilemma, different from South Dakota, is that the Game Commission has released millions of pen-raised pheasants for hunter harvest across the state.

“There are some private preserve operators who release pheasants, but [South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks] don’t do that as an agency,”Runia said.

Decades ago knowledgeableobservers —— including Roger Latham, the former Game Commission biologist and longtime outdoors editor ofThe Pittsburgh Press — argued that the Commission’s release of pen-raised birds diluted natural survival traits that wild pheasants possessed, rendering their offspring less fit.

But even if that could be proven, the Game Commission is in a tough spot with pheasants and pheasant hunters. While virtually no wild birds survive, pheasant hunting remains popular, yet depends entirely on expensive artificial stocking. For the first time, during the 2017-18 season, pheasant hunters are required to buy an adult pheasant permit ($26.90) in addition to a general hunting license (resident adult $20.90).

Except for one limited tract in eastern Pennsylvania, where the Game Commission staged a recent youth hunt for wild pheasants, efforts to restore self-sustaining populationshave failed.