How pheasants survive extreme winter weather

Pheasant season closes in South Dakota on Jan. 31, but the state’s pheasant population now faces a more formidable foe than hunters, as it must endure three more months of a prairie winter.

The recent stretch of blizzard-like conditions and frigid temps affecting most of the state is a prime example of the extreme weather conditions pheasants encounter each winter. Surprisingly, pheasants and native game birds, such as sharptail grouse and prairie chickens, can survive freezing temperatures fairly well as long as they have access to high-quality habitat.

What’s important to remember — and I can’t emphasize this enough — is that the actual temp isn’t necessarily a killer. What is a killer is the loss of a food source when it’s covered by snow and ice, especially for long periods of time.

As temperatures drop, pheasants need to expend more energy to stay warm, and that means significantly upping their food intake. Obviously, this becomes much more challenging for the birds if waste grain in agricultural fields is buried. Keep in mind that agricultural waste grains or seeds from corn, wheat, sunflowers, milo, millet and even soybeans make up over an estimated 70% of an adult pheasant’s yearly diet, and digging and scratching for food through additional snow and ice costs them a lot of energy.

But before we focus too much on the now, we need to go back a few months. Pheasants have been preparing for winter weather since fall, storing up energy in the form of fat reserves for critical situations when they must go for a day or two without food.

Going without food for a few days isn't a big deal for wild birds, but it becomes a serious issue when their primary food sources are buried for extended periods. If they don’t eat for a few days, the first step is burning fat reserves, and almost all the birds have fat reserves. In fact, studies on captive birds have found pheasants can live up to two weeks in January without feeding by relying on fat, but then they start to burn muscle tissue.

Access to high-quality thermal cover is vitally important to the overwinter survival of pheasants.

However, captive birds aren’t spending precious energy by evading predators or hunters, seeking out suitable roosting cover, or searching and scratching for food. Still, going a few days without food isn’t a big deal for wild birds. It turns into a big deal when food is covered for two months at a time, though. That’s when things start to go downhill in a hurry, like last winter when we definitely lost some birds to winter mortality.

A six-part report on pheasant ecology that appeared in the South Dakota Conservation Digest broke down the process of how a wild bird moves from burning fat to using muscle tissue in rare cases to stay warm enough to survive.

“During years with multiple winter storms that prevent feeding for many days, fat reserves, which can make up 13 percent of a pheasant’s weight in early January, can be quickly utilized,” the article said. “When fat reserves are exhausted and a pheasant cannot find enough food to generate body heat, the bird has no choice but to catabolize its own muscle tissue to generate heat.”

All that said, it’s important to remember that pheasants don’t have a good batting average when it comes to their annual survival rate. Hunters, predation, weather, habitat conditions and more combine to knock out half of the population from one season to the next, as their annual survival rate is only about 50%.

But here’s the good news: The current snowpack across most of the state’s pheasant range is far less than more devastating winters, like the winter we had last year. Plus, spring nesting conditions have a far greater impact on pheasant populations than harsh winters. Take this year, for example, as bird numbers have held their own, which is proof that bird production from a good spring can make up for high winter mortality.

And while it may be tough sledding for a few days until this round of snow and cold temps is over, our birds are currently in good shape. Regardless, it’s likely hunters like me will be keeping an eye on the weather in hopes it eases up a bit so that as many adult birds as possible make it to the spring breeding and nesting seasons.