Lifestyles

An exotic in the field

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
About a month ago we were driving down Mica Mine Road after a walk up on Unity Mountain when we saw two ring-necked pheasants off to the right in a field that is kept mown. I was surprised because I don’t think of pheasants being this far north and I hadn’t seen any in the year and a half that I have lived in New Hampshire. On the other hand, they were in exactly the kind of habitat that I am accustomed to seeing them elsewhere: indifferently maintained open fields. That kind of habitat is rare in New Hampshire, compared to states further south, and it is uncommon in Unity, which is largely forested.

More recently, a hen pheasant began visiting our feeders on a regular basis. Last week, I complained about blue jays throwing food out of the feeders onto the ground. Well, this hen is doing her part among the juncos and tree sparrows to clean up the spilt millet and corn.

I first saw the ring-necked pheasants from the window of my middle school in the mid-Hudson Valley of New York. In the early 1970s, Dutchess County was full of recently abandoned agricultural land; there were square miles of land that had been pasture or hay fields and become meadows full of grasses gone to seed and goldenrod. As I daydreamed my way through the sixth grade, I looked out the window at the acres of open land between our school and the Matewan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and watched the brightly colored pheasants strut around at the edge of the athletic fields.

Phasianus colchicus was first introduced into North America in California in 1857 as a game bird. It is native to eastern and central China, but also has a discontinuous range from western Mongolia through the steppe habitat of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, to Armenia and Georgia. They had, however, ranged into northern Greece during the classical period. These birds from the Caucasus subspecies were introduced throughout Europe by the Romans and are naturalized there (and called common pheasants). They were hunted out of the British Isles by the 17th century, and the birds that were reintroduced after the 18th century were the Chinese subspecies, which has a prominent ringed neck.

It is the Chinese subspecies that is most common in eastern North America, but intergrades between subspecies and other pheasant species are encountered regularly. Fowl species have weaker genetic isolating mechanisms than most birds and regularly produce fertile hybrids. Pheasants also readily breed in captivity, so game-farm production has been and still is carried out on a large scale by both public and private entities.

The “Atlas of Breeding Birds of New Hampshire” records successful reproduction by the ring-necked pheasant only in a few places in the southeastern part of the state, where the climate is milder and there is relatively more open land. However, New Hampshire Fish and Game releases birds in the fall in all 10 counties of the state. Hunting season is from October 1 to December 31, although it is closed on stocking days during three two-day periods in October. The New Hampshire Fish and Game site lists all of the places where stocked birds are released. I trawled down past all the Charlestown and Claremont sites until I found it: Mica Mine Road in Unity. According to the “Atlas of Breeding Birds” these pheasants are purchased from out-of-state breeders and in the late 1990s, when the atlas was published, they numbered 12,000 each year.

In New Hampshire pheasants are a bit like stocked trout; they are raised and released to be harvested. Studies cited in the atlas show that hunters recover only about 20% of the released birds and 81% of them die within a month. Ninety-two percent of mortality is due to predation. Even in warmer parts of the country where there are self-sustaining feral populations of ring-necked pheasants, state and private game farms continue to raise and release them.

The male pheasant can be almost three feet long, which includes its lengthy, pointed golden-brown, black-barred tail. We are most familiar with the Asian or Chinese subspecies with is prominent white ring. David Sibley also illustrates both the European and Afghanistan subspecies; neither has a neck ring. The European birds are a rich golden brown below, decorated with black spots, and their necks and crowns are an iridescent purple. The Afghan subspecies is distinguished by white upper-wing coverts. All subspecies have bright red facial skin on the auriculars (cheeks) and supercilium (above the eyes) and have two horn-like tufts of feathers on their heads. The Asian birds have a gray rump, and prominent gray primary and secondary feathers and iridescent green heads.

The hen pheasants are much smaller, just under two feet long. They are light brown over much of their bodies and dappled with black and dark brown markings. The only bird that could be confused with it is a rufous-phase ruffed grouse, which is smaller, with a shorter neck and tail and much bolder markings.

As Sibley notes, the North American population is an amalgam of many different subspecies, so it is possible to see individual birds that combine characteristics of all the subspecies and with those of the Japanese green pheasant (Phasianus versicolor). The latter has been introduced to parts of Virginia and Delaware. In its native Japan it outcompetes P. colchicus where it is introduced, and hybridizes with it in North America.

Pheasant populations have declined by 35% since 1966 as subdivisions have replaced abandoned agricultural land and farming practices have destroyed nests and poisoned the birds’ food sources.

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