Hunters have growing interest in region’s pheasant decline

Jim Hagedorn of Viola, Idaho, wants to bring back the good old days of pheasant hunting, when bagging a limit was common.

“The only way to get them back is to get the brood stock back up to where they are nesting,” he says.

To that end, Hagedorn and other members of Idaho for Wildlife have crafted homemade incubators and are raising and releasing hundreds of pheasant chicks on the Palouse. The idea is to jumpstart the population, particularly with hens, in order to produce more pheasants in future years.

“I remember back in the ’60s and ’70s, you could come out here, you didn’t need a dog and you could limit out in half a day,” he says.

The group has two pheasant chick incubators, near Princeton and Moscow. The incubators have propane heaters, automatic feeders and water supplies. Each can produce batches of about 400 pheasants. The tiny birds recently were released when they were about 4 weeks old.

“We don’t keep them more than 41/2 weeks or they lose their wildness,” he said.

“At 8-10 weeks old they are just like chickens and they don’t want to leave.”

The group has gotten some support with permits from the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and some money to purchase feed from the Idaho Fish and Game Commission. Other than that, it’s an all-volunteer effort.

Commissioners have expressed interest in the strategy and directed the department to study its effectiveness.

Planting birds to boost the population is not a proven strategy. Many wildlife biologists and some hunting groups think it doesn’t work well enough to justify the costs. The incubators cost about $1,500 to build, although donated materials can reduce the cost.

Then the baby birds have to be purchased, kept warm with propane heaters and fed a high-protein diet. If survival is low, the cost per bird can explode like a rooster taking flight. Wildlife managers prefer to concentrate on improving bird habitat for wild pheasants.

But Hagedorn is convinced the strategy does work, especially in areas with good habitat but low bird numbers. He says the key is releasing young birds when they still have some wildness and focusing on hens instead of just roosters.

Survival rates for the young parentless birds are not clear.

He says there would never have been pheasants in North America if releasing captive birds didn’t work.

Pheasants are non-native birds brought to the Americas from China in the 1800s.

Idaho Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, an associated group, has been using the same process in southern Idaho for a number of years, which Hagedorn says has produced good results. Fish and Game biologists have partnered with the group and are now studying survival of birds released across the southern half of the state.

Sal Palazzolo, a private lands and farm bill biologist for the department, says the idea of raising and releasing pheasants is not new. But using small incubators placed in the middle of good pheasant habitat is a different twist.

In southern Idaho, the department is marking roosters raised by the group and measuring how many are killed by hunters in the fall. That will give them an idea of how many of the chicks survive at least until hunting season and could determine whether the department adopts the process.

“Before we step into or don’t step into this, we need to see if it works, or how it works and what the cost per bird is,” he says.

The study is looking at roosters specifically because hunters can only shoot roosters. Several of the southern Idaho incubators sit on department-managed wildlife management areas. Hunters are asked to place wings from birds they shoot in a collection barrel. The department counts the collected wings to measure hunting success.

Palazzolo says counting the number of incubator-raised roosters in the barrels will also give biologists an idea on the survival of hens.

“If X percent of roosters survive until hunting season, we should be able to extrapolate and say the same number of hens should have survived as well,” he said.

If the experiment shows a decent survival rate and a low cost-per-bird ratio, Palazzolo says the biologists will move on to a second phase in coming years – trying to determine if hens are able to survive the winter and reproduce the following spring. If that study produces promising results, he says it is possible the incubators could give wildlife biologists another tool. Good habitat is key, he says, because raising and releasing birds won’t work if it doesn’t exist.

“You have to have habitat on the ground for them,” Palazzolo said. “Whether they are chicks hatched and bred by wild hens or chicks raised in an (incubator) they have to have those basic needs – escape cover, places to get out of the weather, food – no matter what you are doing, you have to have the base amount of habitat and improve it.”

Hagedorn says the incubators have caught the imagination of landowners and he could have several more sitting in good pheasant habitat. Some landowners, he says, are even willing to pay for their own. That could happen in the future, but for now he is busy monitoring the birds and making sure they have food and water.

“Hear them in there?” he asks as he approaches an incubator on land owned by Bear Schultz outside of Princeton. “There’s their feed, there’s their water. Isn’t that something?”

Just recently, Hagedorn opened the door and the birds, over the course of a few days, began wandering out and to start learning to survive in the wild.

Schultz said he got involved so his two young daughters might have the chance at good pheasant hunting some day.