This was a beautiful day for traveling across the Great Plains of North America. Under partly cloudy skies and a mild air mass, the grasslands had taken on the golden hues of autumn and splotches of yellow and rust dappled the streamside woodlands. While migrant waterfowl were noticeably sparse, birding along the Interstate was fairly productive, dominated by crows, starlings, red-tailed hawks, meadowlarks and northern harriers. A large flock of longspurs crossed the highway in eastern Colorado and a few ring-necked pheasants foraged along a cropfield in western Kansas.
Ring-necked pheasants, native to Asia, were first introduced in North America during the mid 19th Century and have since been released in many parts of the U.S.; indeed, more than 30 subspecies can be found in our country, attesting to their popularity as a game bird. Favoring open country, these birds are common on the grasslands of the Upper Midwest and Great Plains, where they feed on waste grain and a wide variety of natural foods (seeds, nuts, berries and insects). Since they rely on tall grasses and thickets for cover, regional populations are often threatened by extensive tilling and crop production.
The large, brightly colored males gather harems in early spring and the females dig a shallow nest on the ground; an average of ten chicks are hatched by late spring and remain with their mother for three months. Those that survive predation by hawks, fox and coyotes are fully grown and independent by late summer; it is then that they must also avoid the watchful eyes of human hunters. While pheasants prefer to escape into dense cover when threatened, they flush vertically if startled and are capable of swift flight over short distances; it is this trait and their tasty flesh that have sealed their fate as popular hunting targets.
