Opening Day of Pheasant Season was once a holiday of sorts in southern Michigan

A number of factors caused the step decline in numbers, with changing farm practices being a primary one

Those of an older age, a category that I now fall under, will well remember that October 20th was once a holiday of sorts in the rural areas of southern Michigan. The date, they’ll recall, marked the Opening Day of Pheasant Season—an occasion when school boys could skip classes with immunity, the older gentlemen would usually take a day off of work, and business owners either hung the ‘closed’ sign on their door or let the wife or staff take care of matters that day.

I refer to this being a holiday for males, since not too many ladies took part in the sport of hunting in those bygone days. That said, there were a few females who joined the fun.

There’s still an opener for pheasant season, but it no longer generates much widespread interest in these parts of the Lower Peninsula. That’s because a good many years ago the number of birds took a gradual and then sudden nosedive and decent places to hunt, even if there were a few ring-necks around, became harder to find.

The time period when I was growing up, first observing the phenomenon as a young boy and then becoming old enough to attire myself in a brown vest and hunter’s hat and carry a shotgun was from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. I won’t hazard a precise date, but it was in the late ‘70s and then the early ‘80s that it got noticeably harder to find pheasants, both because there were fewer of them and because the type of habitat where you’d find them had shrunk and even changed.

Another difference I noticed was that these upland game birds were getting more difficult to flush and, if you did hunt, it was almost mandatory to have a decent bird dog. When I first started, I could head out and often kick up a rooster while walking down a corn field or traipsing across an overgrown meadow. The odds of kicking up a bird were even better when in the company of others.

However, later on, they tended to do a bit of running before taking flight. This was even the case when one was being pursued by a dog. My educated guess, then and now, was that natural selection was to blame. The pheasants easily flushed from cover were the ones that most hunters bagged. Those with a genetic trait to run first and ask questions later survived.

Thus, after a number of years and with enough succeeding generations, the area pheasants began to act more like rabbits than creatures that knew how to fly.

Still, despite the changes, I had the enjoyment of spending time in the field with family and friends in what I regard (as many others do) the most beautiful time of year in our fair state, namely October when the leaves are splendid in their color, the corn and soybean have either been harvested or have ripened to a golden brown, and the frost has killed off much of the other vegetation.

While I always took part in deer season during those years, I preferred hunting pheasant because the weather was usually warmer, the outdoor scenery more pleasing to the eye, and you were able to walk while hunting. You could even chat with your companions.

True, we had deer drives during those years —the country squares being mainly farmlands and woods rather than carved up as they now are into small residential homesteads or subdivisions—but “baby it could be cold outside” and usually you had to fight your way through tangled underbrush when going through a woodlot.

More often, the strategy was to sit in a stand or next to a tree, remaining as still and quiet as possible. For me, the difficulty was finding enjoyment when the temperature was low and the wind biting. And there was the boredom of waiting. I harbor a lot of memories of those longago pheasant seasons. They include hunting with older cousins and school mates—the good times we shared—but also taking off for an hour or so in the afternoon, after getting home from school, and hunting by myself, the family dog sometimes tagging along.

Opening Day, when I was young, didn’t start until 10 o’clock in the morning. With all of the hunters who showed up, having this bit of wait was probably prudent. Still, it was akin to waiting for Christmas morning to arrive when you’re a kid, the clock ticking ever so slowly until the magic hour.

Yet, while I didn’t appreciate it at the time, suffering as I did from youthful impatience, this interlude (in retrospect) was often when the best ‘tall’ tales were told, when the jokes were their funniest, and the camaraderie was at its highest peak. I was often told that the hunting was much better “in the good old days.” As it turned out, in the case of pheasants, this was true. My father would reminisce about driving around the block with an uncle and bagging three or four roosters that could be found in the roadside brush, their main worry being that they didn’t get caught by the game warden while doing so. By the time my turn came, contrary to the normal trend of progress, I had to actually work harder for the same result.

WHEN YOU’RE GROWING UP, THE WAY THINGS seem normal and to have always been just as they then are. You don’t visualize that something as popular as pheasant hunting had been a fairly recent occurrence, nor can you imagine—since the experience has to be experienced—that the heyday would eventually recede and the holiday would end.

Michigan, I’ve learned, held its first official hunting season opener for this game bird on Oct. 15, 1925 and that the ring-neck roosters with their distinctive coloring were native to eastern Asia. It seems a former ambassador to China developed a taste for pheasant while serving as a diplomat in that nation and had several birds shipped to his home state of Oregon. A combination of ideal habitat and mild weather resulted in a population boom. Within eight years the numbers had grown to the extent that the first-ever official pheasant season in North America was held in 1889.

When reports that over 50,000 birds had been bagged on opening day, sportsmen in other parts of the nation took notice and began lobbying to have these birds stocked in their states.

The historical reports indicate that this was not the only lineage that resulted in the large number of pheasants spreading across many parts of the nation during the early years of the 20th century. Traders from the Roman Empire, a couple thousand years earlier, had imported the ring-necks from Asia and these birds had ended up in the British Isles where they did well.

An effort to introduce them to Colonial America, however, did not prove successful. But then about the same time frame as when the birds in Oregon were taking off and spreading to other states, game farms in the eastern part of the United States had started raising birds that could trace their lineage to eggs that had been obtained from Britain. These birds, once introduced to the wild, also proliferated. So, it seems there were two sources that brought about this boom.

Michigan’s Conservation Department—the forerunner of the Dept. of Natural Resources —in answer to the demand, began a large pen rearing and pheasant release program for parts of southern Michigan in 1917.

Ideal habitat, due in large part to the prevailing farm practices of that era, coupled with a lack of predators due to farmers and their kids hunting and trapping them, resulted in a population explosion similar to what had taken place earlier in Oregon.

Eight years later, with conservation officials feeling the pheasants had gotten a firm foothold, the first Opening Day took place. It would remain October 15th until 1952 when it was pushed back to October 20th.

In the years that followed, pheasant season was more popular than deer season. This was due in part to the large number of birds and their close proximity, but also because, back then, there weren’t that many deer in the southern part of the Lower Peninsula. To have any reasonable expectation of finding bucks, a hunter usually had to go north, often across the Straits of Mackinac.

The explosion of whitetails in this part of the state occurred about the time the pheasants had begun to ebb in population. Interestingly, wild turkeys were introduced to Michigan in the early 1980s and have proliferated, a success story similar to what happened with the pheasants earlier.

In fact, I covered the release of several toms and hens at the Barry State Game Area while working for the newspaper in Hastings and remember the DNR official synchronizing the release so I could snap a photo of each bird as it exploded out of its cage. I took several pictures to be on the safe side, wanting one that showed a turkey flying towards the trees.

As things have worked out, many hunters nowadays spend October in tree stands, with bow and arrow in hand, hoping to land a buck, and the turkey season, along with those for geese and ducks, have taken the place of pheasant for many hunters.

Valiant efforts by the DNR, groups like Pheasants Forever, and private land partnerships promoted by the Michigan Conservation Clubs have been undertaken to preserve this hunting option, attempting to bring back some of the ‘glory days.’

But it’s a tall task.

What happened—and I can attest to this from my own background—is that by the 1960s farmland practices began to change, resulting in less suitable habitat. Coinciding with this, the total number of farm acres shrunk due to fewer and fewer small farms, and marginal lands that had been idled under the federal government’s Soil Bank Program were put back into production.

An article published by the Michigan Conservation Clubs elaborated on these points, noting that “The number of farms fell from 190,000 in 1940 to less than 60,000 by 1990. The amount of land farmed also decreased from more than 18 million acres in 1940 to less than 11 million in 1990.

“Although predation, genetics, and overuse of pesticides are among the many explanations for the decline of pheasants, Michigan’s changing agricultural scene and loss of habitat are the main reasons for the decline in population,” the article stated.

“Many practices are no longer wildlife friendly, and are aimed at making more money,” it was noted. “This has been detrimental to pheasants. Such practices include early and numerous cuttings of hayfields, overgrazing by livestock, spraying of pesticides and herbicides (that killed off some of the food supply), double-cropping, and fall plowing and the disking of crop residues.” Pheasants, the article pointed out, thrive on a mix of croplands, hayfields, grass meadows, wetlands and brush. In the 1940s and 1950s— when pheasant numbers were at a high tide in Michigan—farms had small fields from 10 to 20 acres in size surrounded by brushy fencerows and diverse crop rotations. The high grasses, brush, and wetland cover (like cattails) also served as windbreaks and protective cover during the winter months.

But, as I witnessed while growing up and in the years since then, the fence rows were removed, the marginal land was plowed, the fields got bigger with less vegetation bordering them, the main crops became corn and soybeans, and the dairy farmers began cutting the alfalfa fields in early spring and continued doing so until the frost came in the fall.

Of course, farmers have had other, more pressing priorities to concern themselves with than maintaining a large pheasant population.

Along with this evolution in agricultural practices, a lot of farm land and previous wild places have given way to the suburban growth that’s spread outward from the major cities— Detroit being the main one in these parts. This, too, has altered the rural countryside and took away places where pheasants could stage their mating rituals, lay eggs, and rear chicks, and where both the parents and offspring could survive long enough to be hunted.

So, October 20th has again arrived. But no longer a holiday of sorts in these parts, and no army of pheasant hunters will be walking across the fields of southern Michigan. That scene, the experiences that were enjoyed in years past, have become, like so much else, the stuff of fond recollection. The way we once were, but are no more.

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Steve Horton is editor-publisher of the ‘Fowlerville News & Views’, a weekly newspaper in mid-Michigan and has been a journalist for over 48 years.