Old Timey Pheasant Facts

In one of his “Pages Past” columns, The Upland Almanac contributor Glen Blackwood suggested that we hunters spend some off-season time with biological books and bulletins to better know our favorite upland game birds. So I did.

- Mike Lannoo

For the umpteenth time, I reread The Ring-necked Pheasant. It’s a 1945 compilation edited by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist W.L. McAtee and published by The American Wildlife Institute in Washington, D.C. It features contributions by wildlife management luminaries of the time such as Paul Errington, a professor of wildlife biology at Iowa State University, and Howard Wight, an associate professor of forest zoology at the University of Michigan. In different publications, each man was called “a pioneer of animal ecology.” These men collected their data and pulled no punches when it came to identifying sources of pheasant mortality, some of which are within a hunter’s control and border on tragedy.

In their chapter on Ohio pheasants, other researchers Daniel Leedy and Lawrence Hicks reported that hunters took an average of 29.6% of all pheasants bagged on the first day of hunting season, 17.9% on the second day and 8.0% on the third. Thus, 55.5% – more than half – of all birds harvested were taken during the first three days of hunting season.