Every once in a while, I’m going to poke the bear. After all, the point of this column, my job, and conservation in general is to try and change practices or beliefs that are outdated or weren’t proper in the first place. A topic that can rile the old bear up is the practice of releasing pen-raised pheasants. I’m not going after the practice as a whole. There are many operations that are required by law to release them and others that have so many clients coming through that they may not be able to sustain their business model without releasing birds. It’s obviously part of many very successful hunting operations.
Today I’m going after the premise that releasing tame birds creates wild ones. If we can get away from emotion here and repeat that line, “releasing tame birds creates wild ones.” Does that not seem counterintuitive? If you release chickens into the wild how many do you expect to survive a winter, to reproduce, or to even last the week? Pen-raised pheasants are many, many generations removed from their wild ancestors. So, not only do we have birds not growing up in the wild to develop necessary survival skills, it’s also been bred out of them.
I’m not in the habit of stating research finds and sourcing, as I don’t have enough space to do that in this column. I want to put the bug in your ear of what is out there, and I then implore you to go look up the data that backs up what I’m saying. The data shows, and there has been a significant amount of it, given we are talking about an introduced species, that pen-raised birds don’t survive. The alarming part is that not only do they not survive, almost half don’t survive a week, and most don’t survive a month.
People have scoffed, “Well I see them survive the winter, or I’ve seen a hen with blinders on with a brood!” There are the inevitable outliers, but even if it is one in a hundred (which I still can’t be convinced on the hen comment) that is still too low to achieve anything resembling success. I know this metaphor has a subject matter that is much more important than pheasant talk but I think having this PSA doesn’t hurt as it hits home for my family. Pointing to the example of the token pen-raised survivor is like not wearing a seatbelt using the excuse that if you crash into water or there is a fire you will be trapped. The data overwhelmingly shows you are going to survive wearing your seatbelt. Pen-raised birds have no seatbelts, they have no safety net on which to rely on and they are in a head on collision with the real world.
I think I was seven or eight when I started helping a neighbor with raising pheasants. They would get them when they were chicks and grow them to juveniles and release them usually in late summer. This was during the CRP heyday with awesome wild bird populations, but their thinking probably was that they harvest a lot of birds, and they wanted to make sure that they kept the resource strong. Noble thought process but it doesn’t work. Those birds didn’t make it to season. Our land was next to theirs and sometimes they even got released just on the other side of the fence. In all the years we had hunters not once did we identify a pen-raised bird (blinder marks) that had been shot. If you are going to use pen birds for your hunts the only way this makes sense is to release them the morning you are going to hunt because from the moment you release them, they are getting picked off.
Anyone remember the original Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger and “Get into the Chopper!” Just like those guys (except Arnold) were out of their element and helpless against the Predator so too are the pen raised birds against normal predators. As a biologist I don’t worry about predators, they are a natural part of an ecosystem that can burn a lot of time and money to worry about only to have minimal to no impact. That changes with tame birds, they have no survival instincts, and most do die by predation, only because the predators are quicker than starvation which take the ones that are lucky enough to make it past the predators. Unless you have Arnold birds.
There is a notion out there that the tame birds will somehow keep the predators happy and then help the wild ones. In any ecosystem if you increase prey numbers you increase predator numbers, except here you create a superficial increase that is like ringing a dinner bell and now we have an artificial increase in predator numbers that will stick around for a length of time after the easy ones have been eaten. Predators aren’t a problem unless we make it easier for them. Most of the time we are the ones creating the problem, not a coyote.
Maybe the strongest hold that the “tame birds make wild ones” myth has is on releasing hens or bred hens. The comment that often comes is “I sure started seeing more birds once I started releasing hens!” I’m big on let’s not create self-fulfilling prophecies. Do you have a way to prove those birds were not only successful in surviving but successful in raising a brood? Did you create more habitat (put in CRP), was the weather more conducive to nesting or winter survival of wild birds? What does our logic, our common sense tell us? Did you somehow have no wild birds left and the tame ones were our salvation? No that doesn’t make sense.
What makes sense is habitat. We grow our wildlife populations by increasing the quantity and quality of our habitat. Doing a better job in those areas creates more birds and it creates resiliency in a population when the weather is not as conducive for reproduction. Whether it is released birds or predation, the biggest contribution you can make to the health of the wildlife on your land is habitat. All those other things are distractions that take our eyes off the real issue, habitat or lack thereof. There are many successful lodges and hunting operations that must release birds, but for those of you just looking to hunt with your friends and family or want the wild bird experience, it doesn’t make sense for your goals or your wallet. Your money is best spent on habitat.