An Efficient Method for Quickly Surveying Pheasant Nesting Site Preferences

Pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) are an important game species and are the impetus for many prairie/grassland reconstructions. Understanding their nesting preferences, especially related to plant community diversity and structure, is important for improving "restoration recipes." Traditional "walk and flush" methods for locating pheasant and duck nests are labor and time intensive and rely on physically locating actively nesting hens (e.g., DeSante and Geupel 1987, Higgins et al. 1969, Ricklefs and Bloom 1977). This approach may also increase the risk of nest abandonment (Evans and Wolf 1967). In addition, high-diversity, forb-dominated plantings with many tall, stout-stemmed plants are particularly difficult to search by rope-dragging or walk-and-flush methods. As part of a larger study evaluating the effect of floristic diversity on songbird nesting site preferences, we tested a new method for quickly locating legacy pheasant nesting sites that were at least a year old. This new technique benefits from the ease of spotting egg shell fragments in the "blackened" landscape after spring prescribed burns. Pheasant nests were also located by traditional walk and flush, conducted simultaneously with the songbird nesting study, allowing a direct comparison of the two methods.