1pheas4, thanks for the video, a moving picture is worth a thousand words. This is a healthy wild pheasant. And this video also show how adaptable the truly wild pheasants are. I have been hearing about these Detroit city pheasants years.
When I was a kid growing up in Texas, I would pick up a Field & Stream or Sports Afield magazine and see a glossy picture of a rooster pheasant in a corn field in the snow. For years, because of sport media bias, as a kid I believed that wild pheasants could only exit in areas of the world where corn grows and it snows in the winter.
The shocking truth came to me in the army when I was station in Ausburg, Germany. At the edge and inside field areas of that town I noticed pheasants (every third rooster had a full ring). I said to myself we have snow around these parts but where are the corn fields for the pheasants to feed in, no grain fields for miles.
Other soldiers in my unit noticed my interest in pheasants. One guy said to me there are pheasants back home in the field where I come from. I said where are you from, he said the Secremento Valley in California. Another surprise, he said to me that he flushed pheasants out of the rice fields in that area.
Another guy heard the conversation and said that he hunted pheasants back home in the cotton fields. And I said where are you from, he said Plainview, Texas. I said we don't have wild pheasant in my part of S. E. Texas.
That was over 41 years ago, we now have wild pheasants in the rice fields of S. E. Texas near Chambers county. Those birds came from wild-trapped pheasants from Sacremento Valley and they were crossed with White-winged and Iranian specie of the true pheasant and released along the Texas coast. The TP&WD sent California wild trapped Rio Grande turkeys in a trade for the wild pheasants.
Mexicali cotton field pheasant hunt below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CqZL84G9Nkw
We still have a great deal to learn about the wild true pheasant.
