Trying to bring pheasants back to the Palouse

A small but diverse crowd devoted last Saturday morning to catching, cuddling and banding 7-week-old juvenile rooster pheasants behind Jim and Barbara Hagedorn’s house in Viola, Idaho.

Ranging in ages from single digits to more than eight decades, the dozen or so hunters, farmers, bird lovers and children found the coop alive with the soft whistling of young birds just starting to get their colors.

The large, open-air coop attached to several miniature pheasant houses left space for the numerous volunteers to do their work near virtual living carpets of slightly nervous birds. Occasionally startled, the birds would take flight in an instant whirlwind of dust.

Lane Hanson, 12, his sister, Paige, 14, and their father, Dan, live only a few hundred yards from the Hagedorns and have been working to raise pheasant for the past few years, but it was their first time banding them.

“It was really fun, and I got to feel good about helping out,” Lane said. “It was kind of scary when they all flew up, though.”

“It was a hurricane of beating wings,” his sister added.

Paige said she enjoys the birds most when they’re just hatched.

“They’re really cute when they’re really small,” she said.

But Saturday’s banding project was only part of a larger mission.

“I used to hunt birds until I was blue in the face,” Hagedorn said. “Back in about the ’80s – late ’80s into the ’90s – our pheasants just disappeared around here, and we didn’t have any more to hunt. I think it was about 20 years ago I started raising pheasants.”

With a group of friends and neighbors, and help from Idaho Fish and Game, Hagedorn started a crusade to repopulate the area, as well as allow for youth hunts and public viewing spots.

The group has raised more than 4,000 pheasant this year, Hagedorn said.

“These birds will be released on the Palouse River bottom. We are developing hunting and wildlife viewing areas for youth under 15. The viewing will be for everyone. We hope that working with Idaho Fish and Game that we can develop a number of places that you can go and see a group of pheasants,” he said.

Hagedorn has learned a lot over the years about the best practices for raising pheasants.

“I started out in the garage in cardboard boxes, and I used heat lights. Raising them in the garage was not the right thing to do, so I started building brooders. And we just kept building,” he said.

Hagedorn pointed out one hand-built brooder among the small pheasant houses at the back of his property.

“That brooder’s probably turned out I don’t know how many hundred birds.”

But shelter for the birds isn’t the only lesson he’s learned while working to bring up big, healthy pheasants worthy of the hunt.

“When they’re a week, 10 days old, you like to keep them right at 100 degrees. We use either propane or electric, and if you’re raising them out where you don’t have any electric heat we use propane,” Hagedorn said.

But a five gallon propane tank with what’s called a “pancake burner” only lasts about a day, so Hagedorn searched for other options.

“We worked with a company in Minnesota and developed an infrared heat. Now a five gallon tank of propane will last a week or better. It’s been a learning process,” he said.

Hagedorn said he’s also learned the longer he and his group keep the pheasant in their coops, the lower the natural mortality rate.

An extra three weeks makes a big difference.

“We were turning them loose at about 4 weeks of age, but we found out if we can keep them until they’re about 8, 9, 10 weeks, that’s when they’re really hardy. We started keeping them longer and longer. The survivability of them is tremendous if you keep them until they’re 10 to 12 weeks old. It just makes all the difference in the world,” he said.

Although the mission of restoring the pheasant population to the Palouse is a big part of Hagedorn’s motivation, he has a personal reason as well.

“I just like pheasants,” he said laughing. ‘That’s it.”