Ring-necked Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus)

County List:

Rule:

Mixed Forested/Nonforested or Nonforested Landscapes

Nesting and Foraging Habitat Requirements may be distributed over the COMPARTMENT

Nesting Habitat:
      Field/Pasture

Foraging Habitat:
      Any Cropland

Habitat List:

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Literature:

Habitat: Ring-necked Pheasants are better able to live in the devastated landscape produced by intensive agriculture than any of our native gallinaceous birds. Ninety percent of the pheasants observed in the Atlas Habitat Survey were in row crops, old fields, or hay. Hayfields are attractive nesting habitats for this ground nester but few nests survive the mowing, which also kills or maims many hens. Small numbers of nests are placed in grain fields but these fields are more important as foraging areas. A high proportion of the productivity of most pheasant populations comes from the relatively few nests in permanent cover - old fields, grassy and shrubby fencerows, and marshes. Crowing territories of males often include brushy cover but where this is unavailable territories are established in herbaceous cover.

Fall plowing, elimination of fencerows, wetland drainage, and the shift from small grains and forage crops to row crops are some of the more damaging changes in agricultural land use. While some herbicides and pesticides poison and kill pheasants, their more subtle effects of reducing cover and insects necessary for the development of hatchlings are also very damaging.

Habitat: Breeding: Open cultivated fields of grass or grain, fallow fields, bushy pastures, hedgerows by roadsides, cut-over land, open ungrazed woodlots. Agricultural lands provide the best habitat. Absent in mountains, avoids forested areas. Wintering: Birds seek areas with dense protective cover, often swamps interspersed with thickets.

Habitat: Farms, fields, marsh edges, brush. May live in any semi-open habitat. Sometimes in open grassland but more often in brushy meadows, woodland edges, hedgerows, farmland with mixed crops. Access to water may be important; pheasants are often common around edges of marshes and are rarely found in very arid places.

Diet: Omnivorous. Diet varies with season and place. Feeds on wide variety of grains and smaller seeds, fresh green shoots, buds, roots, berries, insects, spiders, earthworms, snails; rarely eats lizards, snakes, frogs, rodents. Diet may include more seeds in winter, more insects in summer.

Nest: Site is on ground in dense cover. Nest is shallow depression lined with grass, leaves, weeds.