Ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus)
This time of year we often like to introduce you to a “Crawly which can also be an option for your Christmas main course.” This year we meet the Ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus colchicus).
Ring-necked are native to Asia but were introduced to the United States as game birds and now can be found wild in the western and northern/central US as well as southern Canada.
Who introduced pheasants to the US you ask? Why Oregon, of course! The very first pheasants were brought to the Willamette Valley by Judge Owen Denny in 1882. You’re welcome! everyone else in the US who has since enjoyed Pheasant Under Glass!
Yup, that’s a real dish and you can grab the recipe from this week’s Recipe Corner on pg. 8.
While there are sightings of pheasants in our area, your best bet is to head over to the Klamath Wildlife Refuge to see one of these stunning birds up close and personal.
Ring-necked are also raised domestically, so you may have a neighbor who has some.
While brought in as a game bird, ring-necked can be a bit tricky to hunt. They depend on agricultural type lands for their food – cereal grains and other seeds – as well as for cover so many of the areas where they live are on private land. We don’t blame Denny for being shortsighted, we’re sure hunting laws were way more fast n loose in 1882. Though hunting on your neighbor’s land has always been universally frowned upon.
However, state wildlife areas offer opportunities for hunting on public lands, and some federal refuges also provide pheasant hunting.
With the male pheasants’ uber fancy plumage, you might think they are easy to spot in the wild. You would be wrong. Both male and female ring-necked excel at two things: 1. Not being seen 2. Flushing and fleeing with binding speed if they are seen.
Their yoked breast muscles deliver bursts of power that allow the birds to escape trouble in a hurry, flushing nearly vertically into the air and reaching speeds of nearly 40 miles per hour.
When not fleeing, even the flashy males will disappear into their grainy, grassy, tall vegetation habitats.
Despite their ability to flush fabulously, ring-necked aren’t great flyers (which probably factors into their popularity as game birds). Usually they won’t fly more than 600 feet at a go, though one time one was recorded flying a “whopping” four miles with a good tail wind.
From all that you might well deduce that ring-necked don’t migrate. Another reason to head over to Klamath during the cooler months, they won’t have as much vegetation to hide behind, and you might even get to see a colorful male against a winter white background.
Because they are non-migratory some pheasants have developed a unique winter coping mechanism, when it’s just too cold, they will simply remain dormant for days at a time. We can all relate to that.
We’ll leave you with a funny pheasant fun fact: Female pheasants sometimes lay their eggs in partridge or prairie chicken nests. This may explain why some male pheasants have been seen chasing away male prairie-chickens and courting females—the pheasants may have been raised in prairie-chicken nests and imprinted on the wrong species.
