doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com UK pheasants, ticks, and disease

Yes that number seems a little implausible. But I certainly could not offer a better one. Does anyone have any reliable estimate?

Lymes disease is no fun, but at least now it is recognised by most medical folks and they seemingly have a clue as to how to treat it.

If you think you might have it, Dr. Richard Horowitz's book "Why Can't I get Better" is a good place to start. He developed the first and ultimately the best treatments for it.

Read the book "Bitten" by Kris Newby sometime if you want to know the history of this disease.

Dr. Willy Burgdorfer was complicit in it's creation.

The fifty million birds part is the most interesting part of all of this to me.

In Iowa we have harvested one million birds per year 33 times and only twice in this millennium. Currently, we are harvesting less than a quarter of that.

I can't really offer a reliable estimate of pheasants released in the UK nor can I comment on their involvement in Lyme disease. However it is certainly a huge number. The BIG shoots put down 10's of thousands of birds each and in certain areas of the country there are quite a few BIG shoots. Some on these shoots offer 2-400 bird days several days each week from late October to the end of January. Working on an average of 300 birds/3 days per week/12 week season = nearly 11000 birds killed and a 40% return on birds put down would give a total of roughly 25000. And that is one shoot. My local estate that shot 6 days in the reason and only 80-120 bird days put down 500 partridges and 1000 pheasants. And that doesn't include wild bred birds.
Comparing to Iowa isn't helpful because you have bag limits, we don't!
I don't doubt the 50 million is an exaggeration but the real number is still staggering.
Now that everybody has to register if they keep even one bird in confinement (because of bird flue), it should be easy enough to establish the real numbers if you could be bothered.

Where I've shot over there, it's usually 8 guns in the line Seldom any less than 6. And we ask the owner and the game keeper to keep the possible daily bag right around200 birds per gun. And they always seem to do a pretty good job of presenting that many birds to us. Then it's up to us to do our part. At the really big shoots, numbers will often be much higher. The well run shoots will keep pretty careful score every day. And if the total is running high or low, they will throw in either an easier or a more challenging day, depending.

In the States , the bag limit most places is 3 cock birds per day. I think Kansas still does 4. Hens are protected. That's talking just wild birds. There are commercial places that release birds to add to the potential total.

For comparison, there are about that many laying hens in Iowa and slightly more than a quarter that many domestic turkeys.

50 million seems incredible to me, but I guess they are not there for long - just flesh and blood targets for a short time.

This is old news; from 99'
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422073-500-hold-your-fire/
Klaus Kurtenbach of Oxford University...says Lyme disease is only found in Britain because pheasants are reared in artificially high numbers.

Despite the fact that ticks carrying Lyme are found everywhere in England & Wales "particularly in woodlands and grasslands where wild animals (including deer) and livestock are also abundant."
https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2024/03/21/what-is-lyme-disease-and-why-do-we-need-to-be-tick-aware/

That is certainly plausible given the dynamics of disease systems.

I was not aware of this; from 2021
https://microbiologysociety.org/pub...e-of-an-emerging-zoonotic-infection.html
"Highly endemic countries such as Slovenia, Germany and Austria, the Baltic coastline of southern Sweden, and some Estonian and Finnish islands may record over 100 cases per 100,000 population per year. In 2018, the average recorded incidence for the north-eastern USA ranged from 2.3/100,000 in Massachusetts to 92/100,000 in Maine."
No mention of pheasants.

Pennsylvania had the most cases in 2022 with an incidence of 65/100,000
https://usafacts.org/articles/which...me-disease-and-other-tickborne-diseases/

All mammals have ticks and fleas and all animals have parasites. The connection is via deer mice, which are an essential host of the tick which carries Lyme, and which are a major prey for foxes and other small carnivores. Coyotes kill foxes, reducing their population and leading to more deer mice. Wolves kill coyotes, leading to more foxes and fewer deer mice, hence less Lyme. So the obvious answer is to reintroduce wolves wherever there is Lyme, right?