Gary Greene’s Memories from an Old Hunter.…#45
As a pheasant hunting guide with hunting clients, occasionally, I would discuss the history of pheasants in America and specifically Wisconsin. Most hunters didn’t know that the pheasant is a non-native bird but in 1882, it was successfully introduced in Oregon from Asia. In Wisconsin, the bird was first introduced in 1916 by Gustav Pabst in Waukesha County.
Those wild birds took hold, but the Wisconsin DNR tried stocking birds for many years and found that since they were pen raised birds and many generations removed from the wild, they did not have the skills to survive and reproduce successfully.
I always wanted to care for my own pheasants, so right after college I purchased a rooster and a hen from an old friend, Tom “Whitey” Grafenauer. The year was 1973, and at that time, the Wisconsin DNR strictly regulated game farm pheasants. I had to get a state license and get my containment pen approved. I applied after the fact and had made a pen from scraps that I found around my family’s old rental farm. I had no building experience or skills as those came later in life.
The DNR representative saw my pen and smiled, while holding back laughter at how poorly it was constructed. He said he would have to come back for an approval after I upgraded my pen using new and correct materials such as wood studs and chicken wire. Straight out of college and cash poor, I didn’t want to invest money into this project but I had no choice. I made the pen for under $75 but with minimum wage being $1.80, for me that was a week’s pay.
My pen finally passed approval and I named my birds Gomer and Thelma Lou after the Andy Griffith show characters. Muskego still had a wild pheasant population and I loved waking up to my rooster crowing and others responding from the surrounding fields. I recall on several occasions, wild pheasants would attach my rooster through the chicken wire and I would witness an old fashion cock fight.
My neighbor Tommy Corona was about ten years old and he always had interest in whatever I was doing. He loved feeding the pheasants but occasionally he would forget to lock up the pen door. One morning, my rooster Gomer was gone. I released Barney, my English Springer Spaniel and ran him in the grasses next to the pen. I figured that bird would be long gone but Barney ended up catching him only about twenty feet away. After I thought about it, that pen was home to that bird so why would he go far away and he sure didn’t. He appeared to have a severe leg problem from Barney’s retrieve. Not really having any idea what I was doing, I made a split and stabilized the leg for about a month and the rooster made a full recovery. Again, I had no clue to what I was doing, but it seemed like I needed to do something.
About two years later, when I moved out of my parent’s home, I had to sell the birds. The man who purchased them was going to use them for dog training, it was a sad ending for Gomer and Thelma Lou, but they never would have survived in the wild. They had no learned skills to find food or avoid predators. I have read that pen raised pheasants have about a 2% survival rate in the wild with most dying within the first two weeks.
Fast forward to 2009 and I had just purchased an old, five acre mini-farm just east of Lake Lorraine. I wanted to watch pheasants from my kitchen window, so I made a proper 20 by 20 foot pen with a small shelter protecting the birds from winter’s northwest winds. I purchased two roosters and two hens. I again enjoyed waking up to the roosters crowing or as I like to call it: “Cackling.” They lived well together for almost a year until the following spring, when during mating season, the two roosters began to fight over the two hens, and fight they did, to the death.
One of my hens had a dozen eggs and responsibly sat on them for the required 25 days or so. Whenever I would come into the pen to water and feed them, she would fake a broken wing to lead me away from her nest. In the wild, ideally, a predator would follow the injured pheasant rather search for the eggs. Even though she was many generations removed from the wild, she still had those inborn survival skills. Two seasons, about 50% of those eggs hatched but the chicks disappeared within 48 hours. I never found a dead chick and I’m really not sure what occurred as it happened during the night.
Just as 40 years earlier, the gate was left open and all three of my pheasants escaped. I had numerous dogs by this time, so I selected the one with the softest mouth and lead Hershey into the adjacent spruce trees and yelled: “Bird.” Within five minutes, she had caught all three pheasants and none was worse for the experience. Just as before, the birds stayed close to home and didn’t realize they had that flight capability if they had wished to use it.
Three years later, and after moving and marriage, I gave my three pheasants to a woman who owned a bird sanctuary and that’s where they lived out their life. My birds lived longer than most, but were they happy? I don’t know, but it was the only life they knew. The average life expectancy in the wild is ten months to two years, in captivity they may live longer if not subject to diseases in a contained space.
We now live in the East Troy countryside and I have seen one wild pheasant in five years. I mentioned to a hunting friend that years ago if you saw a wild turkey, in amazement, you would stop the truck. Now, wild turkeys and Sandhill Cranes are a daily occurrence at our home and if we were to see a wild pheasant that would require a stopping of our truck.