Number of pheasants down in Southeast Missouri

By PAUL DAVIS ~ DAR Outdoors Editor

For a short few years in the early 1980s, upland bird hunters in Missouri's Bootheel could look forward to good pheasant hunting. Granted, it was nothing compared to the hunting available in Iowa, Kansas or the Dakotas, but hunters usually could count on seeing birds during each trip.

That is now no longer the case, and, unfortunately for hunters, the days of wild pheasants in the region may be numbered.

"It's not a real happy story " said John Schulz, a resource scientist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. "It's kind of sad, really."

Pheasants were introduced to the Bootheel in the 1970s, according to Schulz.

Habitat was a key issue then, as it is now. Before the initial stockings three decades ago, biologists looked the world over for a strain of ringneck pheasant that could tolerate and survive in altered habitats. What they found was a bird from Korea, and that's what they stocked in Missouri. In 1982 the Conservation Department held its first experimental season in the Bootheel.

"Hunters killed 4,362 birds in that first season," said Schulz.

However, the following year's harvest was cut by more than two-thirds, with only 1,400 ringnecks killed.

By 1992, only 848 roosters were harvested.

It was clear to biologists and hunters that something wasn't right.

Just like the decline of the bobwhite quail, many blame the pheasant decline on the loss of good habitat to aggressive farming techniques, but Schulz isn't so sure good habitat even existed when the birds were introduced.

"What I think happened is that we put birds into vacant habitat," said Schulz.

A number of factors are probably to blame for the decline, Schulz said, including marginal habitat, predation parasites and maybe others.

"It certainly has changed," said Ken West, an MDC regional protection supervisor who hunted the colorful birds for several years southwest of Caruthersville.

"It wasn' uncommon for us to go down and each kill birds," West said. He and his hunting partners focused their efforts around "big mounds of brush off the drainage ditches."

When West's dog got too old to hunt and birds got nearly impossible to find, he gave up on Bootheel pheasant hunting.

"It's sure not what it used to be. The last time I went was in 2004," he said.

West primarily blames habitat changes for the pheasant's demise.

"Back then, it was mostly corn and soybeans. We could always find pheasants in the corn," he said.

"Now cotton has blossomed in the Bootheel and it's devastated the birds. There simply aren't any birds anymore because of the habitat."

Predation has killed many of the birds, but not the typical predators you might think would be responsible, said Trent Lane, MDC's Bootheel area protection supervisor.

"One of the pheasant's biggest predators is rabbit hunters shooting them out of season," he said. "We've made a few arrests. That's been a big factor."

Lane did say populations of bobcats and coyotes have been increasing for years along the region's ditch banks, and they will readily kill pheasants.

Natural reproduction is almost certainly non-existent, Schulz said.

"With so few birds, to have a hen and a rooster find each other would be miraculous."

Because success is hard to come by, hunter participation has dropped dramatically over the years.

While driving the area's backroads as the region's top conservation agent, West said he rarely finds someone who's actually hunting pheasants.

"Most are quail and rabbit hunters who might shoot a pheasant if they saw it," he said.

MDC agents still conduct roadside surveys each August in order to estimate the pheasant population, but rarely are birds seen, so adequate data can't be collected.

As far as hunting, Schulz said data is hard to come by. He believes last year only 46 hunters pursued pheasants, killing well less than 100 birds, but that's only an educated guess.

"The number of birds killed in the Bootheel is so small, we can't even register a harvest estimate from our mail-out surveys," Schulz said.

MDC's pheasant management plan for the Bootheel expired in 2000, Schulz said, with no plans to start another one.

"We tried just about everything known to man to establish pheasants across the state and regardless of what we do, they want to persist only along the Nebraska and Iowa borders," Schulz said. "Everything else is working towards a complete failure."

MDC now will focus more on quail restoration.

"I we were provide some kind of program to help pheasants and quail because they provide great recreation," said Lane.

Schulz has pretty much conceded defeat of the program his predecessors worked so hard to establish.

"A lot of people have busted their butts on this project but at what point do you close the book and say we gave it our best shot?" he asked. "Everybody's convinced there are better ways to spend our money."

There's no bright future ahead for Southeast Missouri's pheasants, Schulz said, but he is optimistic about another type of hunting in the region.

"Southeast Missouri is one of the best dove hunting areas in the country. We're a serious player when it comes to dove hunting," he said.

Still, that's little consolation for the hunters who enjoy the thrill of a cackling pheasant flushing from cover.