Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 08:28:16 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: Gail Mackiernan Subject: Pheasants etc. In-Reply-To: <003e01c2d0c0$8a21bbc0$41662c42@rjdolesh> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Hi all - In 1972, when we moved into a house on University Blvd. in Wheaton, on 2 scrubby/wooded acres backed on two sides by parkland, we had both Bobwhite and Pheasant on the property. This was a *very* developed area! I still have a tail feather from a cock pheasant that used to stalk across the back yard in the morning. One day we had a covey of a dozen or so quail basking in our driveway, less than 30 feet from busy University Blvd and a well-used bus stop -- when we pulled our car in they flew off in a real clatter! The first major decline of these birds that I noticed occurred in the terrible winter of 1976 when the Bay froze and I (at that time at the Chesapeake Biological Lab in Solomons) played hockey with friends on the frozen inlet behind the Marine Museum! After that winter we no longer saw Pheasants and heard/saw very few Bobwhite on our property. By 1980 both species were definitely gone. There was no change in the habitat or in use of pesticides, nor on the adjacent parkland. However, I still had Bobwhite and Pheasants in my Atlas blocks in the mid-1980s, in middle and upper Northwest Branch Park. The latter a huge field/scrub area but the latter primarily wooded with some open grassy plots. Pheasants occurred in the upper park as well (as did Meadowlarks). Although this habitat has not changed that much (until recently, they are unfortunately mucking up the field area in the upper park at the moment) we bird it regularly and have not seen or heard either game bird in the last 7-8 years, with the single exception of a pheasant crowing that my husband heard 2 years ago. So they may just hang on but quail are long gone. I have noticed a similar experience in my CBC area (Lilypons Gardens and vicinity) -- in 1990 we had lots of quail in the count, a year that a reporter from the Post accompanied us on our rounds -- she was really taken with the number of quail we flushed! Of course in summer you would hear pheasants crowing and see them in the fields. The bottom has fallen out of both species in this area, and although Lilypons is probably doing a little more mowing than they used to in the public areas, they do not use pesticides and there still is lots of suitable habitat. Of course many of the farm fields are gradually disappearing under houses but in areas which have not changed (e.g., still dairy farms), no pheasants. I ask the farmers if they see/hear quail or pheasants and they say, "not for a long while." Ironically, the last place I have actually SEEN Bobwhite in the area was at Kenilworth Park, D.C. in 2001, where a population hangs on (hopefully still there, I did not hear any last year but we didn't bird it as much because of the drought and heat). They apparently use the park, Aquatic Gardens and Arboretum as we heard them in all three locations. Why pheasants are/were not found in the coastal plain is a very interesting question. I know Delaware introduced the "green" pheasant and they apparently "took" for at least a while -- this is a subspecies of ring-necked pheasant which lacks the ring and has some other color differences. Not sure if the birds are still surviving, though. Certainly, in some areas, increased predation by foxes (which have increased quite a bit as they have adapted to human presence) and probably also free-ranging cats (which has been well-documented in rural areas of the midwest) also impact declining populations of these ground-nesting birds. Increased frequency of hay-cutting hasn't helped any of the field birds, either. I would be interested to hear of any research which has examined the decline of these two species and made any strong links to possible causes (beyond speculation). Gail Mackiernan Colesville, MD gail@mdsg.umd.edu ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================