Bob Frye / Tribune-Review
Pheasants have proven they can survive still in Pennsylvania if the habitat is right. Too often, though, it seems, it’s not.
There will be hunting inside one of the state’s wild pheasant recovery areas next fall.
Just not the kind you might think.
In what appears to be a tacit admission that the recovery areas aren’t working as hoped, the Pennsylvania Game Commission is tweaking the rules regarding them.
Wild pheasant recovery areas are places where the commission and Pheasants Forever did habitat work and released wild birds from other states. The goal all along, noted commissioner Tim Layton of Windber, has been to create self-sustaining, huntable populations of wild birds.
“At this point we’re just not seeing that happen,” he said.
There’s one exception. Portions of the Central Susquehanna wild pheasant area are holding birds, apparently.
Next fall, the commission will conduct a limited, permit-only youth-only hunt there.
Regulations likely to be adopted by the commission in January call for running it much like the state’s elk hunt.
One organization – almost sure to be Pheasants Forever – will get a number of permits to auction off. The rest of the permits will be awarded via a lottery.
Those youngsters will get to chase wild pheasants in assigned “hunt zones.”
Unfortunately, that’s looking to be the best the wild pheasant recovery program can hope for, said Bryan Burhans, deputy executive director of administration for the commission. The pheasant recovery areas just aren’t holding birds, he said.
One of the state’s four recovery areas, in Somerset County, will probably be disbanded for 2018-19 unless it’s shown to be holding significantly more birds by then, said Wayne Laroche, chief of the commission’s bureau of wildlife management.
The Franklin County one will, if all goes well, get a release of wild birds from South Dakota this winter, he added. But the commission will simultaneously be looking at whether it might make sense to reduce its size, he added.
The Hegins-Gratz area may get birds, too, but the commission said it may be willing to evaluate it with fewer than the 900 originally called for.
Either way, the ultimate fate of both those areas will need to be decided sooner rather than later, said Layton.
The problem behind the lack of birds surviving is what’s on the landscape, Burhans said.
“It simply boils down to one thing, one simple thing, and that’s habitat,” he said.
Executive director Matt Hough agreed. Some potential pheasant cover that was developed specifically for the birds has disappeared as commodity prices have changed. Farmers, he said, have gone from being willing to allow fields to remain in warm season to planting them with corn, soybeans and the like.
“You can’t control that,” Hough said.
The likelihood is that, going forward, the recovery areas will never be able to support general hunting for wild birds, Burhans said. He predicted that for the sake of the pheasants and landowners, any that does occur will have to be run, like the youth hunt, on a limited, permit-only system.
Perhaps with all that in mind, commissioners are also expected in January to take steps to open up the recovery areas to other activities.
Stocking of farm-raised pheasants will continue to be prohibited, if the new rules gain approval.
But the existing prohibition on hunting other small game species within a wild pheasant area will be lifted. Dog training would become legal, too, outside of the March 31-July 1 window. That’s to protect any nesting birds.
