Pheasants

Last night Ann and I attended an excellent presentation by Iolo Williams at our local Town Hall, about the wonderful variety of wildlife we have in Wales. He was less complimentary about pheasants, however . . . As it happens, I'd decided that pheasants would be the topic of my latest "Nature Notes". I do quite like the stupid old birds, but in terms of the impact of pheasants on the environment and other British wildlife, I suspect Mr Williams and I are not that far apart in our views.

So here's my article :-

We quite often hear pheasants from our garden, even though we’re in the town, and sometimes they stroll in and peck at whatever’s under the feeders. They’re gormless birds, but quite attractive; I sort of like them. They are not a native species, but may well have been here since Roman times, and certainly since the fifteenth century.

The British landscape is for the most part able to accommodate and provide for a reasonable population density of pheasants. So in some arable and lightly wooded areas across the UK there is reckoned to be an entirely natural and self-maintaining pheasant population, but elsewhere the presence of pheasants is largely due to the bird being reared and released for shooting purposes. The genuinely wild population is probably experiencing a gentle decline, meanwhile.

Some thirty-five to forty million pheasants are reared and released in the UK each year, and at times it seems that most of them (plus a fair few red-legged partridges, also not native) are scattered about on the lanes along which I’m trying to drive. Shoots are a very big business; opinions differ as to the extent to which the very big operations that some shoots now are can be described as ‘sporting’, and also as to what contribution they really make to the rural economy. I wouldn’t wish to argue for either side of the debate in this article, but I do confess to some disquiet over the release of quite so many of any animal or bird into our countryside; pheasants can do damage to young shoots (friends living on the edge of the Stiperstones had a thankless task keeping the local pheasants out of their rather lovely garden) and also to reptiles and amphibians that they will attack and kill.

It’s also sad to see so many killed on our roads. It takes quite a lot to persuade a pheasant to take to the air, and so they are quite vulnerable to vehicle strikes. They can do some damage, too! - I remember one taking out one of my headlamps on the main road between Shrewsbury and Much Wenlock, and costing me £100. If 35 million pheasants are released each year, and the industry reckons 15 million of these are shot, which is some 55-60% of the lowland game bag, that leaves a lot to be killed on the roads, I’m thinking.

Pheasants forage on the ground and occasionally in trees, and have a varied diet of grain, fruit, and insects and other invertebrates including worms, plus from time to time frogs, slow worms and lizards. Left to their own devices they nest on the ground, in a scrape often in tall grass or under shrubbery, and lay between seven and fifteen eggs. The male gives a guttural call, flying up as he does this so you also hear the wing beats; one male may have a harem of females which he works hard to defend from rivals. Most male pheasants have a white ring around the neck, but races of pheasants have been increasingly mixed by captive breeding and releases, and so you’ll find quite a variety of plumage, including darker ‘melanistic’ birds.