The people of eastern Kansas that want to have a healthy wild reproducing population of wild pheasants will have to do what the citizen of the Texas panhandle did in the early 1960's, in order to get wild pheasants started.
They were told back than (1960) that wild pheasant would not survive south of the Canadian River and south of I-40 ( old Route 66). Look at article below it gives more of the story:
http://amarillo.com/stories/2001/12/02/whe_legionsofspo.shtml
Note from the article that they released thousands of wilder and more predator wary and alert strains of the "ringneck" pheasants, like the Manchurian pheasant the Sichuan also called Strauchi pheasant (the article called them Asian blackneck pheasant) and the Afghan Whitewing pheasant (also called the Bianchi pheasant). These wilder strains will not let a predator get anywhere near them. And they will not stand on the side of the road like a dodo bird to get picked off by road hunters.
The true pheasants strain are all subspecie of the same specie therefore hens of all of these pheasants are almost identical. After 50 years all of the pheasant will look like regular ringneck (full rings) pheasants but they wili inherit the wild wary/alert genes of the Afghan whitewing pheasant and others.
Fat tame pen raised pheasants will not work, they will just make the predators fat, fat predators have baby predators.
You need slim alert pen raised pheasant with the good sense to crouch at the first sign of danger, duck and hide quickly from predators.
A good friend of mine was involved in the panhandle release years ago and he told me that they released over 22,000 pheasants over a 10 year period, the best results were seen in spring releases.
Now wild pheasant are seen all around Lubbock. Look at the link below:
http://texashuntingforum.com/forum/...53/Went_to_Plainview_this_weekend#Post5464453
Missouri, also released wilded and more wary/alert F1 strains the Korean ringneck pheasants ( identical to the Chinese ringneck but more wary of predators). look at link below:
http://www.jstor.org/discover/3799981?sid=21105065961821&uid=2&uid=70&uid=2129&uid=4
http://news.google.com/newspapers?n...ZYfAAAAIBAJ&sjid=U9QEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2121,4626279