Wild pheasant a link to ancients

WALKING through a rough field with lots of furze bushes, rushes and tussocky grass. Suddenly the dog’s behaviour changed.

He had been pottering about aimlessly with a grin on his face, enjoying the walk. Now he was concentrating intensely.

He ran in small circles with his nose to the ground and every now and again he made a vertical leap in the air to see over the tall vegetation.

Then, he set off at a run with his nose down, and, after about 25 metres, a cock pheasant rocketed into the air and flew off cackling.

This sort of thing is not unusual, but it is rather remarkable. My dog has never been used for shooting. He’s not pure-bred, but his ancestors were gun dogs — probably springer spaniel and English pointer. And hard-wired into his genes is a compulsion to flush pheasants.

What’s odd is that he’s not particularly interested in other species of bird. So he’s making an ornithological identification, usually by scent alone, resulting in the conclusion that there’s a prey species in the vicinity that must be hunted.

What I find even more extraordinary is that this piece of conditioning is not something that’s evolved over thousands of years. Gundog breeds only date back to the development of the sporting shotgun, about 250 to 300 years ago. And pheasants are not a native Irish species.

The nearest native pheasants are in the Caucasus mountains, which stretch from the eastern shore of the Black Sea to the western shore of the Caspian Sea and, for most of their length, form the border between Russia and Georgia. There is evidence that the first European pheasants were brought from there to Greece about 2000 years ago.

The original reason for their introduction was probably as ornamental birds. The cock pheasant is a handsome creature and the first European ones probably strutted around the grounds of important houses, rather in the manner of peacocks.

But it was a long while after that before pheasants reached Ireland. The precise date is not known, but they were probably introduced by Anglo-Normans around 1580. Again, the motive was firstly for ornament and secondly for food. Pheasants only became an important sporting species some centuries later.

About 200 years after the first Caucasian pheasants arrived in Ireland, another race of pheasant from China was introduced. They were slightly larger and more brightly coloured with a white neck ring and eye-brow.

Both races are found in Ireland today, along with hybrids between them. The Chinese race is more common.

In the mid 1800s, shooting flying birds with a shotgun became a very fashionable pastime. The owners of a number of large sporting estates in Ireland and Britain came to the consensus decision that the pheasant offered the best target, and the species started to be hand reared in very large numbers by their game-keepers.

This still goes on in Ireland today, though the emphasis has shifted away from game keepers and large estates towards game farms and gun clubs. But most scientific research shows that the large numbers of birds hand reared and released every year have little impact on the wild, or feral, population.

Most hand reared birds are shot within 400 metres of their release point with less than 1% travelling more than 2 kilometres. There are about 1.1 million pheasants in Ireland but, because they are polygamous, only about 40% of these are cock birds.

So, the probability is that the pheasant my dog flushed the other day was not bred in captivity but, because it had no white neck ring, was the naturally bred progeny of birds of the Caucasian race that were released, or escaped, into the wild in the late Middle Ages.

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