Where do the pheasants like to nest?

B

Bob Peters

Well-known member
I always hear about nesting habitat and nesting cover. I realize that pheasants are adaptable and can probably use many different areas. But what do you think is her favorite? Is it about species of grass, thickness, and/or height?

P.S. A few months back I asked about prairie grass species on here. I took advice from people, and got a book in the mail that gives good descriptions of different native grasses.
 
A5 covered it pretty well. The thing about nesting is there is a lot of cover available. At first. Ditches, alfalfa, pastures, etc., all provide great nesting cover. Dense, tall and can often provide a lot of the nutrients the hens need. Sadly, a lot of those get mowed/grazed. The best nesting/brood rearing habitat (outside of CRP) is winter wheat, IMO. The height and thickness is just right. Where I've seen nests typically includes the following: dry, hidden but not buried (grass is maybe 8-14" high), and often near or along trees.

I am a fan of asparagus and pick it from the ditches each spring and see a lot of nests doing that.

Last thing I'll note is that the landscape changes dramatically during the pheasant's nesting season. There's no other time during the year, save harvest, when there is a greater change. Things go from late spring brown and fairly barren to lush fields by the end of June. Regardless, Henny Penny adapts to whatever the world gives her.
 
Winter wheat is very important, but it's not the panacea it used to be. A better way to say it would "winter wheat can be extremely important". A combination of farming practices and shorter varieties of wheat have made it less desirable as nesting cover than it used to be.
 
matto said:
Winter wheat is very important, but it's not the panacea it used to be. A better way to say it would "winter wheat can be extremely important". A combination of farming practices and shorter varieties of wheat have made it less desirable as nesting cover than it used to be.
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Very interesting. I'd not heard that. Is the N bioavailability higher in shorter varieties? I should start by saying my familiarity with winter wheat serving as pheasant habitat is in west central South Dakota, but the farmers I know out there put consideration toward what they can put back into the soil after harvest when selecting seed.
 
I'm getting a little ahead of my skis here, I don't even know what "N bioavailability" means. Most of my info is from talking to and reading stuff written by Randy Rodgers, who was the lead small game and upland biologist for Kansas for a very long time. From him and from my personal experience of hunting in Kansas since about 1980, here's what I know. The Dakotas are surely different.

In Kansas, peak hatch is said to be approximately June 10. In the southern part of the state, wheat harvest is well under way by then. Not so much as you go farther north, but every year is different. A late wheat harvest is a good thing for the Kansas pheasant hatch, as long as it wasn't too cool or wet.

Wheat stubble is much shorter than it used to be, which is a combination of newer varieties and cutting height. Some of it isn't much taller than your ankle. It used to come up to maybe the top of your shin or just below the knee. The only wheat stubble I've seen that tall lately has been cut with a stripper header. Lower cutting height=greater chance of nest destruction and hen mortality from the combine. Lower cutting height also reduces the cover available for any nests or broods that survive harvest.

It's sprayed for weeds soon after being cut. We all know that weeds=bugs=chick food.

KDPWT clearly understands the impact of wheat stubble. The Habitat First program offers to pay farmers for leaving stubble of at least a certain height, delaying spraying, leaving edges unsprayed, and/or not spraying at all. I'm not sure how well known, well funded, or popular it is, but it's on the website.

Randy Rodgers had an article in KDWPT's magazine many years ago titled "New Life for Wheat Fallow". It's still available. It advocated for modifications to crop rotation, tillage, spraying, etc. and claimed that the changes produced higher profits (not necessarily higher yields) and more pheasants. My conversations with him much more recently revealed that those recommendations wouldn't apply to the fields where I have some influence over farming practices. The article was about much more arid areas. Regardless, it was a great education on the relationship between pheasants and wheat stubble.

More recently, there was an academic paper about the use of cover crops by pheasants in Kansas. I'm not qualified to discuss the findings in depth, but one line in that paper stood out. The author described growing winter wheat as an "ecological trap" for pheasant nesting. Ie, it's great in April when nests are started, but by mid June it's not so good.
 
Nitrogen (N). More vegetation = better for soil.

Our wheat harvest is a ways behind that. Obviously, that makes a world of difference in relation to pheasant nesting. Additionally, most of the guys are using stripper (rather than reel) to keep the vegetation in the soil. Thanks for the explanation. I will see if I can't find some writings by Randy Rodgers.

Are the farmers in the area you hunting using no till?
 
Winter wheat is a proven nesting area.

An amazing number of ducks and pheasants nest in road ditch grass. Some states have roads where ditch mowing is prohibited until around July 1 or 15. Road ditch grassways can unfortunately be routes that skunks, red foxes and coons follow routinely.
 
Yes, the majority of land around here is no-till.

The farther west you go in Kansas, the more stripper headers you see. Where I hunt it's mostly reel-type headers. I recently had a conversation with a central Kansas farmer about stripper headers. He used them on fields where he intended to swath and bale the straw, which would be a disaster for pheasants. In his opinion stripper headers left too much straw, which would eventually lay over from wind, snow, etc. Then when it was time to plant again, his equipment struggled to punch through the layer of straw to get the seed into the dirt. He did acknowledge that they were great for conserving moisture.
 
matto said:
Yes, the majority of land around here is no-till.

The farther west you go in Kansas, the more stripper headers you see. Where I hunt it's mostly reel-type headers. I recently had a conversation with a central Kansas farmer about stripper headers. He used them on fields where he intended to swath and bale the straw, which would be a disaster for pheasants. In his opinion stripper headers left too much straw, which would eventually lay over from wind, snow, etc. Then when it was time to plant again, his equipment struggled to punch through the layer of straw to get the seed into the dirt. He did acknowledge that they were great for conserving moisture.
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Thanks so much for your explanation. It's fascinating the variables we are all dealing with in our hunting grounds. I really appreciate the discussion. I would add that I don't think winter wheat is a substitute for idle grassland, but offers a great supplement.
 
Ditches primarily, fence lines/shelterbelt second, grass choked CRP or crop stubble way in third. Nesting needs are moisture and bug attracting plants- ditch weeds are the prime mix for that. Most CRP doesn't provide that if they get their sloughs drained and are not in a program that requires burning/disc work to get rid of grass choked acres and seed back with varied plants that end up approximating ditch weeds. Crops lands spray off weeds and bugs nearly everywhere now.


Pheasant habitat improvement is only seen with returning sloughs to the field/CRP, restricting ditch mowing until after hatches and widespread public predator management. That's specifically what we have in our control. Putting a crop field into CRP might give you some weed cover for a couple years but never the winter cover or moisture a slough provides and the weeds are replaced by grass within a couple years. It's large scale farmers, politicians they pay off and dog walking hunters that have a lot of time to chase low numbers of birds get a bunch of short term benefits from CRP. "I'm from the government and I'm hear to help" doesn't work with pheasants any better than anything else.
 
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