Wheat and pheasants
- Thread starter oldandnew
- Start date
Prairie Drifter
Well-known member
Where are they going to renest? The wheat never got tall enough in the first place and is now either tilled under and planted to row crops or sprayed dead and just as short as it was to start with. Milo isn't a viable nesting cover. CRP is shrinking with every pass of the disc. We'll do well in a lot of those places to maintain the numbers we had in '13.
Bilbo Baggins
Active member
Yes, oldandnew, I do subscribe to the wheat crop theory. At least, the wheat harvest was late this year and that might help out.
BritChaser
Well-known member
I wonder how big a role wheat now plays in pheasant reproduction with continuous cropping (no fallowing) and weedless stubble from yearly herbicide. In the days of yore about 50% of the wheat fields would be fallow every year and were weedy when the season started. Such fields offered the best pheasant hunting.
Last edited:
Prairie Drifter
Well-known member
From a nesting standpoint, the green wheat provides around 70% of the nesting habitat in much of western Kansas. The fallow rotation provided much improved brood-rearing and winter cover. Having both is why we had so many more birds in years gone by. However, you have to think about it as a pyramid. The nesting habitat and carryover bird population is the foundation of the pyramid. The smaller that layer is, the smaller the pyramid. When nesting is the limiting factor, you can expect a much lower peak. Having an extended harvest will surely help. Having weedy stubble out there longer will surely help. However, if the plow and disc eliminate that cover and the birds have nowhere to go, they will again be lost and the period with no cover will be the limiting factor. We need every layer filled to capacity to make our pyramid more like a high rise! If they are all weak, it will look more like an August hatched roosters spur come fall, barely more than a scale! Luckily, our weather, wheat, and other habitats are a mosaic of good, bad, and ugly. Somewhere a young boy or girl will think this is the best year of their young life! Hooray for them!
Great post!:10sign:
Prairie Drifter
Well-known member
Frangler, this might be a good place to explain why in most of the pheasant range that food plots are of very limited benefit to pheasants. Food plots are high on the pyramid. They don't even factor in until AFTER the production for the year has been achieved. In some instances they do fulfill a brood-rearing role, but it is often late in the hatching period and they are usually of limited acreage. The also can help bring hens through the winter in better reproductive condition which can add numbers to the recruitment. However, for the expense that it takes to develop them, the money would have a much greater effect if spent on the foundation of nesting/brood-rearing.
mustistuff
Banned
sprayed wheat
don't fully understand. from my experience when wheat is sprayed, of course there are few to no weeds and also no pheasants. however in years of moisture often times the wheat stubble is high, thick, provides cover and surely there is food on the ground, yet, no birds, they seem to avoid it like maybe the plague. so what else is happening, is there an smell, they don't like, does the wheat taste bad to them, what's going on, seems to me they would still use it. need help
cheers
don't fully understand. from my experience when wheat is sprayed, of course there are few to no weeds and also no pheasants. however in years of moisture often times the wheat stubble is high, thick, provides cover and surely there is food on the ground, yet, no birds, they seem to avoid it like maybe the plague. so what else is happening, is there an smell, they don't like, does the wheat taste bad to them, what's going on, seems to me they would still use it. need help
cheers
I am thinking that pheasants, like quail, need that open space. the chicks are small need easier to negotiate terrain, dust baths, with overhead cover. Year old research in Oklahoma found that a large number of successful quail nests were in Soybean fields, here before, thought to be worthless. I think the key is having both the weedy edges, or strip row farming at best, provides the weeds, the bugs, as we all know the bugs will be in the wheat crop, in an area where little bugger chicks can run them down. Pheasants will sure get into dense cover, but prefer exposed ground to run in, with overhead avian predator protection. Just my two cents.
Prairie Drifter
Well-known member
Oldandnew is on it. I think that there are also environmental conditions in the sprayed wheat stubble like excessive heat due to not having an overhead canopy. Not having the insect population is a significant contributor as well as the fact that as they age they are consuming some green vegetation as part of they metabolic water requirement and that is also absent. I'm sure, from a survival aspect, that the have some avoidance of it because of the lack of that overhead canopy as well. If you watch birds in the field, when a hawk floats by, they all tuck under something and hide their heads. If you want to carry this to the extreme, there may be something genetic telling them that they stick out in that single colored straw. I'm always amazed at just how camouflaged a brilliant rooster can be as long as his copper breast isn't showing.
M. R. Byrd
Well-known member
Herbicide vs. the plow.
I vary my travel routes and I take a lot of back roads daily. One particular piece of ground has caught my eye. I have recently seen both a quail hatch and a pheasant hatch along side it in the road ditch. This quarter section(160 acres) has totally gotten away from the farmer from the ten inches of rain in June. It is a jungle, an eight foot tall jungle, of pigweed, fireweed, lambsquarter and sunflowers, and I suspect a good number of pheasant and quail live there, that is until today. You see today, the farmer is pulling his disk through that jungle, going round and round, leaving nothing standing as he works to the middle of the field.
This disk will leave zero nest and likely zero young birds will escape the final pass. Hard for me to watch. A herbicide burn down could have left some survivors.
I vary my travel routes and I take a lot of back roads daily. One particular piece of ground has caught my eye. I have recently seen both a quail hatch and a pheasant hatch along side it in the road ditch. This quarter section(160 acres) has totally gotten away from the farmer from the ten inches of rain in June. It is a jungle, an eight foot tall jungle, of pigweed, fireweed, lambsquarter and sunflowers, and I suspect a good number of pheasant and quail live there, that is until today. You see today, the farmer is pulling his disk through that jungle, going round and round, leaving nothing standing as he works to the middle of the field.
This disk will leave zero nest and likely zero young birds will escape the final pass. Hard for me to watch. A herbicide burn down could have left some survivors.
mnmthunting
Banned
M.R. I've seen that happen more then a few times, heartbreaking if your a pheasant hunter,
The farmer disking was no doubt under pressure from FS and/or neighbors to get rid of the weeds?
The farmer disking was no doubt under pressure from FS and/or neighbors to get rid of the weeds?
Gettin Birdy
Member
Great info Prairie Drifter. Always a pleasure to see a hunter who has solid facts and good information to share!:thumbsup: