Day 17 of the 365 Project: A Ring-Necked Pheasant
Why Wouldn’t Anyone Take a Photo of Such a Beautiful Ring-Necked Pheasant?
It goes without saying why I would take a photo of such a beautiful bird.
I haven’t seen many of these beautiful birds in a long time. When I was a kid, I had a German Short-Haired Pointer and we would go hunting pheasants. They were quite numerous, where I lived there was a lot of farmland mostly pasture (or hay fields) and corn fields.
You could hear the pheasants crow all the time.
I’d usually get a shot at one or two each time I’d go out. Hitting one was a different story, but I loved watching the dog work a field and suddenly freeze on point.
When RG&E bought up most of the northern part of Cayuga County and proposed to build a nuclear power plant offering the farmers more money for their land than they would ever earn farming the land started to become overgrown and the pheasant population seemed to decline.
There may be other reasons for the decline too. Fur prices declined and the fox population increased (not to their benefit – but that is another story. Also, I seem to remember the first coyotes, or what we called coy dogs showed up. The reduction in trapping also saw the population of opossums, skunks, and raccoons rise.
The increase in all of these predators and opportunity scavengers may have impacted the survival rate of nesting females and young. At the same time, we saw a decrease in Ruffle Grouse too. The decrease in open farmland might also impact the population of pheasants
Did You Know Pheasants Are Not Native to North America?
Nope, Ring-Necked Pheasants were introduced to North America from Asia in the late 1800s. They adapted well to northern climates and spread across the country. The NYSDEC stated the following:
Pheasants are a popular game bird that have blessed New York’s landscape since first being successfully introduced in 1892 on Gardiner’s Island. A later release in 1903 on the Wadsworth estate, near Geneseo, truly established this Asian immigrant and helped popularize pheasant hunting in New York. Populations peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the “heyday” of the ringneck. Today, wild pheasants are difficult to find. Most wild pheasants are found in the Lake Plains of western New York.
NYSDEC
I find it funny how some introduced animals are a blessing and others villains. Are pheasants invasive? They probably haven’t pushed out any native species, but because they are a popular game bird and beautiful they probably wouldn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers if they did.
Anyway, what else can be said about why I took this photo? Look at the color of that bird. The bright red caruncle on the pheasant’s head contrasted with the iridescent blue neck, the reddish-brown and speckled feathers, the pale blue feathers down the back and wings, and the long tail feathers make this one of the most stunning almost-native birds here in the northeast.
Day 17 of 365 is in the books!
