Just as I suspected. Thanks for your input, honest & objective as ever. I suppose SD has to be that way, since all the pheasants died over winter.
One thing in MN, you go to the game farm or pheasant farm. Some states stock WMA's, that should be public knowledge. When you see a guy drive out in a 4-wheeler and toss birds from a crate into some bluestem or foodplot with mowed paths, you know what it is. In SD it's a "hunting preserve". So basically it's a much more elaborate fake. Larger pieces of grassland with mixed foodplots that look immaculate. Wild birds that are supplemented by the on-site hatchery. This doesn't bother me at all, when people realize the truth of it. I have an acquaintance from Georgia. He sent me a private video a few years ago of him and a large group of buddies hunting in SD. They were walking a good sized milo plot, with bird after bird getting up at their feet, every guy in the group yelling their lungs out to identify the sex of the bird. I told him, "looks like a game farm." His reply, "no, it was land our guide put us on."
I knew it!
Well, since they behave more like domesticated chickens, you really don't have to check their nostrils either. They have no natural instinct to evade hunters or predators.
No. For years we thought that planting pen raised birds was the solution to establish and increase a wild population of pheasants. We now know that it does nothing except give people a reason to shoot a fake wild pheasant.
Even a blind squirrel can occasionally find a nut.
I'm going to have to disagree (some) with the notion that they can't make it in the wild. I have no data to quote from, but my gut feeling is that they are better at it than quail. I read somewhere that 1 of 100 quail can make it. From my experience it's more like 1 of 100000. I've heard stories about released Phez surviving, at least for some years on the prairie type ground north of here. I live near a state put and take area and have seen pheasant months after being released. Curiously though all haves been a rooster. Was the 1st released birds from wild Chinese birds? I don't know about Pheasant, but a wild quail won't live in captivity. Don't ask me how I know. As for preserves, you guys that po po them remind me of myself not that long ago. But funny how time tends to soften one's opinions. Also, I bet if the wild birds were almost gone as they are here, you'd be singing a different tune. I'm from a long line of bird hunters. I loved talking to my second cousin (RIP) who was 25 years older than me, a setter breeder and avid quail hunter, about his grandfather and mine's hunting escapades together and their dogs. I remember talking about the declining quail populations and what the future held for them. Not long afterwards he and his brother opened up a preserve. I never understood why he would do that when there were still wild birds to be had. Now I know! Mother nature and father time takes its toll on all of use. After a few years of being depressed about the poor quail #s and the fact that I was no longer the 15 miles a day stud I once was, I accepted my fate and became one of those guys I used to make fun of. And I bet that's exactly what my old cuz Donnie did!
They were. They were captured in the wild and transported to the US. Same thing with the birds originally brought from Oregon to South Dakota. I believe it's been that same story everywhere there is a significant wild population today.
