treblig:
I live in southeastern PA and the only pheasants wandering wild I'm aware of are escapees from preserves and they generally don't last long. Talking to a guide on a private club I had the opportunity to shoot at, I was told that the pheasants which escape generally don't last the winter and are always gone before summer. In spite of considerable effort on the part of the club, they haven't had even a hint of success in breeding a carryover population.
PA used to be great pheasant country when I was a teen (back in the late 60s and early 70s). What happened?
Rem
A bunch of things all at once.
1. Bird flu coming out of the chicken houses around Philly in the winters of '81-'83 hit the wild birds hard.
2. Older farmers (the guys who took their GI Bill benefits to buy a farm) aging out and younger ones coming in. The younger ones needed to farm more acres more intensively to make their nut, so
(a) they needed bigger, faster equipment to do it, so out came the fencerows, and where they didn't yank the fencerows they cleaned out a lot of the understory and thinned them so as to not "waste" acreage, and
(b) in the alfalfa fields around where I grew up, they went to an earlier first cutting. June alfalfa was prime bug-hunting country for pheasant chicks and the edges prime nesting territory. Instead of mama pheasant and her chicks fluttering out of the way of the cutter, moving the first cutting up a week or two meant mama pheasant and her nest got chopped up. And
(c) Farmers went from the old-model corn harvesters, which left busted stalks and such in the fields all winter, then plowed them under in spring. The old equipment left a lot of cover/concealment in the stalks and good amount of corn behind. They switched to the kind that chopped the stalks and roots, mixed that into the dirt and left the fields basically bare earth all winter. No cover/concealment and no food.
3. Developers buying out the other farmers and busting up the landscape of 60-120 acre farms, fragmenting the habitat.
4. Edge habitat growing up, manifesting in deer and turkeys showing up where none had been before.
5. Resurgence of hawks.
6. Arrival of coyotes in the mid- to late 70s.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of pesticide tie-in, too.
There were a lot of birds in '81 when I went overseas. When I got back in '84, there were very few. By '85-'86 it wasn't even worth buying a license.
