Time of year brings issues for pleasant pheasant

This is not a good time of year to be a pheasant in Ireland, writes Dick Warner

The legal shooting season for them is from the beginning of November to the end of January. The logic behind this is that by the beginning of November young birds, even those hatched late in the year, are fully grown and that by February some cock birds may be starting to gather a harem with a view to mating.

The fact that one cock will mate with several hens is also the logic behind making it illegal, in most cases, to shoot hens. But the minister has considerable discretion when it comes to laws about shooting. Licences to shoot hens are regularly issued to large sporting estates that rear thousands of birds. And if these estates have a surplus of birds at the end of January they will often be granted an extension to their season.

The rearing of pheasants is not as intensive here as in England where 90 million are reared every year and it’s reckoned their biomass exceeds that of all other birds combined. In Ireland there is a healthy population of over a million pheasants that live in the countryside and breed naturally. This is augmented by pheasants that are bred on game farms and bought by gun clubs for release on their lands.

These birds are commonly fed grain from hoppers. A third type of pheasant rearing takes place on sporting estates, many of which are run as commercial operations. Large numbers of birds are artificially reared to be driven by beaters over a line of guns, rather than to be ‘walked up’ by a couple of shooters with their dogs, which is the normal practice in gun clubs.

There hasn’t been a lot of research done here on the ecological impact of releasing pheasants into the countryside. In the North the Copeland Islands are a bird reserve and when pheasants were released there they wiped out a breeding population of 20 pairs of water-hens by out-competing them for food.

But the ecological contribution made by pheasants has a positive side as well. They feed many predators and, as carrion resulting from roadkill or birds wounded by shooters, many scavengers as well. Magpies, hooded crows and foxes eat quite a lot of pheasant.

But there is some rather sinister research from Britain suggesting pheasants carry internal parasites to which they are fairly immune but which have a disastrous effect on some other wild birds. They are now strongly implicated in the decline of the grey partridge in Europe. The grey partridge has been saved from extinction here by a truly wonderful conservation effort, but it is still very vulnerable. Even more worryingly, pheasant parasites are now being connected with the decline of the corncrake which, despite intensive conservation effort, is likely to become extinct as an Irish breeding species in the near future.