The Weather Notebook: Pheasants

Pheasants
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

The winters in South Dakota are often long and cold. A particularly brutal season can cut wild animal populations, like pheasants, in half. In South Dakota, people pay attention to such startling statistics since pheasants outnumber people there 8 to 1. As Curt Nickisch reports today, pheasants can survive the harshest of winters as long as they have the right habitat to protect them.

Last winter in South Dakota there was at least an inch of snow on the ground for a record 141 straight days. The long, snowy winter was extremely hard on wildlife. Farmer, Will Stone remembers.

WS: And it wasn't only pheasants that suffered last year and the winter of '97. There's dead coyote, dead fox, dead deer. When the snow started to melt we really understood how vicious a winter could be when you don't have habitat.

Stone farms and runs a hunting preserve in northeastern South Dakota. He says wild animals can withstand extremely low temperatures as long as they can find food.

WS: Birds eat, the deer eat, there's only so many feet off the ground. If it gets too deep they're just not going to be able to reach the food.

He lets cattails and grasses grow tall in slues along the edges of fields providing wildlife with food for protection. Animals thrive on his place the way that Chinese Ring-necks did when introduced here in the early 1900's.

WS: These pheasants thrived through the 30's, the rough winters that they had and dust storms and everything else and it's just because they had cover.

Stone says many wildlife populations would revive if every farmer left a little strip of unplowed land around their fields. In Pierre, South Dakota, I'm Curt Nickisch.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by Subaru of America. Thanks today to producer, Margaret Landsman.