From the jungle to our pleasant shires

It’s that time of year when many look forward to that tingling sense of anticipation and excitement synonymous with the start of a shoot day. A male ring-necked pheasant in full glory is an unmistakeable haze of hues. In the warm autumn sunshine, that coppery shimmer of armour seems impenetrable. But, in the British countryside, perhaps the azure buzz of an accelerating kingfisher exceeds the pheasant on the exotic front?

Millions of years of evolution in the sub-tropical forests of Asia have produced a diverse and colourful range of pheasant species. Genetic studies indicate that the ‘common pheasant’ has eight distinct evolutionary lineages made up of 30 sub-species across the south part of the Eastern Palearctic – geographically that’s from the edges of Eastern Europe, via China and Vietnam, all the way to Japan.

The Hengduan Mountains, located at the eastern edge of Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in Southwest China, are a biodiversity hotspot. Across hundreds of miles pheasants share habitats with giant and red pandas. Picture the scene. A sambar deer, ears twitching, freezes mid-step at the distant sound of a Yunnan pheasant alarm call. The guard of the glades may have spotted a leopard on the prowl.

There have been hundreds of research papers published about the biology, ecology and behaviour of pheasants introduced to Europe and North America but until recently few studies in their original habitats.

In 1943, two researchers travelled up the Vakhsh river in Tajikistan to study a local pheasant population for four months. They describe birds frequenting riverside thickets of wild olive and with details of their ‘love performance’. Birding discoveries aside, quite an adventure they undertook amidst a world war.

In the 20^th century various war zones have encroached on pheasant habitats and there are accounts of soldiers enjoying walked-up game shooting as R&R. In 1989, two young scientists, Peter Robertson and John Carroll, visited the Pangquangou Nature Reserve, Shanxi Province, China, observing the behaviour of ring-necks and estimating their autumn densities. A formative experience perhaps, given that Peter and John have spent decades drawing attention to the conservation status of many rare and endangered species of grouse, pheasants, francolins, and partridges worldwide.

Local expert knowledge of many pheasant populations will have died out over the millennia with the tribes that once frequented those places. In Chinese culture, the golden pheasant is thought to be the ancestor of the phoenix and pheasants are symbolic of imagination, creativity and good luck. Paradoxically, in Chinese art, pheasants often feature in tales as a bird of ill omen.

I wonder if the white stripe/patch of plumage on a ring-neck has ever been woven into local folklore? Perhaps it was the mark of a lightning bolt from the heavens, or thumbprint of an angry nature god? I guess we may never find out.

For a thousand years suitable lands around the forests of South-East Asia have been cultivated for agriculture. The main Chinese reference to pheasant is zhì 雉 and various species and sub-species have adapted to farmland, rice fields and so on. Here in the UK pheasants have been around since Roman times and these shy forest-dwelling birds have become intertwined with British rural life, with the shooting community their custodians.

The vital management that provides pheasants with food and habitat fills an ecological niche that benefits so many birds of conservation concern. It all started hundreds of years ago with the ‘Old-English Blackneck’.

DNA sampling of pheasants worldwide means that the taxonomists are constantly revising their understanding of which pheasant is which and where they came from. It is a story as much about avian evolution as it is about the trade routes that have developed between different human civilisations over several thousand years.

In China there is a growing interest in pheasant shooting and hunting tourism between USA, UK and Asia is picking up. With all that in mind, at the start of your next shoot day perhaps take a moment to pay homage to the fascinating and ongoing story of the humble pheasant.