It could be that the turkeys have driven our pheasants away. Investigation continues. EDM
Ed, we wonder the same thing about turkeys and our collapsed quail population here in Georgia. Baby quail look just like fuzzy little bugs; a perfect beak-full for the omnivorous big bird...Geo
I didn't mean that the turkeys ate the pheasants. It's just that when the big birds move in and occupy the limited cover in numbers, the smaller birds likely feel more comfortable by moving somewhere else.
Another observation is that just recently after our latest big snow storm, the pheasants we do have congregated on and near our plowed road, for the gravel I presumed, but I also observed them pecking weed seeds from the weeds standing above the deep snow cover, which makes sense; they gotta eat, and all the corn scattered under the iced-over snow cover isn't accessible. And in fact the pheasants can thrive absent corn, wheat, beans, and other row crop residues simply by ingesting the ever-present non-economic seeds...and herein lies my thesis for our declining pheasant populations: Things ain't what they used to was.
When I was a kid and pheasants were plenty, corn was on 42-inch rows and average 60-bushel yields, with much of it standing through the snow cover and harvested by a corn picker for storage and drying in corn cribs. Along came the combined picker and sheller ("combine") and narrower rows, dropping to 38-inch, then 30-inch, and we are now on 15-inch rows with yields exceeding 200 bushels, but the changing practices leave little for the wild bird populations...and there is more to the story...
Until about 15 years ago Round-Up Ready beans didn't exist, and the weeds had a chance. Round-Up isn't killing the pheasants directly, as it is so benign that the average housewife can buy it in the hardware or grocery store to tune up her garden. Every licensed herbicide has a "L/D-50" number, the higher the better, as the number means the Dose-quantity by body weight necessary to be a Lethal for 50% of the tested population. Round-Up has a sky-high L/D-50 number, even higher than aspirin, and is widely used and considered
the safest of herbicides...and here's the catch:
The stuff is so deadly to tough weeds that it kills everything but genetically altered soybeans and corn. Round-Up has preformed miracles in cleaning up the tillable acreages, and by cleaning up the beans there is a clean-up carry-over to rotated corn. My fields are clean as the proverbial hound's tooth and my pheasants need to gravitate to the scant cover near my roads to get a bite to eat when there is snow cover. The turkeys are better able to get to the snow-covered crop residue and are commonly seen in the corn stalks, thus marginalizing the pheasants to the
diminished interior and exterior fence rows, for which reduction of cover and food source we farmers are culpable.
Our equipment is gigantic by historic standards; no more 40 acres and a mule and 42-inch rows; no more 35 HP tractors and corn pickers doing 80 acres on 38-inch rows...fact is that the old military-like pheasant hunt with an armed formation walking standing corn and blockers stationed at the end of the field went the way of the passenger pigeon when farmers adopted 30-inch rows...and now with 15-inch rows and Round-Up Ready beans, plus the elimination of interior fence lines to open up fields for the large equipment, and now BT corn (diminished worm larva) and, finally, Round-Up Ready corn: IMHO these taken together are the root but invisible causes of declining pheasant populations, just like the destruction of habitat triggered the decline and ultimate extinction of the passenger pigeon.
And there's not much we can do about it, unless the Obama administration decides to nationalize agriculture along with everything else, limit farming operations to 40 acres, and guarantee a mule in every shed.... Investigation continues. EDM
