Pheasants survive despite cruel drivers

Press, 11 October 1986, Page 19

Pheasants survive despite cruel drivers

Country Diary

Derrick Rooney

Waste not, want not. That was the attitude of a motorist the other day when she saw a truck run down and kill a cock pheasant. She stopped, and picked up the corpse. Its tail feathers are now looking good in a vase and, she says, the salvable parts of the body made a casserole. Very nice it was, too. This tells us something about human nature as well as pheasant nature. The pheasant had decided that piece of road was his territory, and he was not about to step aside for anything; presumably the truck driver felt

much the same emotions because, according to the motorist, he made no attempt to avoid the bird.

“I’d say he ran it down deliberately,” she says. One of the pheasants that we reared and liberated last summer died in almost identical circumstances. He was run down and killed by a tractor driven by an employee of a local firm. A farmer saw it happen, and told us afterwards that he was as mad as heck about it (he didn’t actually say “heck” but you get the drift). The tractor, he said, had plenty of room to go around the bird. If there is an irony in this moralistic little double-barrelled story of casual slaughter it is that of all the game birds which have been established here it is the pheasant which is most admired — for its beauty. The pheasant in New Zealand also has a boom-and-bust history which has been the cause of a century of frustration for game bird managers.

On its initial introduction the pheasant thrived to the extent that within 15 years it was abundant and almost a pest in most parts of the country; yet within three decades its numbers had dwindled almost everywhere to the point of extinction, and the reasons for this were not understood for nearly four decades. A Mrs Wills, who came to Wellington in 1842 as a passenger in the sailing ship London, is generally credited with being the first person to import pheasants. She brought a cock and three hens in her luggage. A year later a Mr Petre, of Auckland, imported more pheasants from England. On Banks Peninsula, pheasants were breeding in the early 1850 s, after a pair kept by a Pigeon bay woman escaped or were liberated. The birds made their way to Port Levy, where apparently they multiplied rapidly. These were all English pheasants. Ringneck pheasants, first imported in the 1850 s, inter-

bred with them to create the hybrid race that we have today. Thomas Henderson, of Auckland, probably had the first ringnecks in New Zealand; he imported five cocks and two hens (survivors from a shipment of 24 birds) directly from China in 185,1. After acclimatising, these pheasants, and a further six imported a few years later, were turned out in the Waitakere ranges, from where they spread rapidly, reaching as far north as Whangarei and as far south as Taupo within 15 years.

In the South Island, the birds were much in demand among the Southern gentry. One of the biggest enthusiasts was Ready Money Robinson, who was ready to spare no expense to establish them on his estate at Cheviot. He erected huge aviaries, ordered his staff to kill all cats on the estate, had hawks killed at the rate of six a day, and eliminated the natural population of wekas because they competed with his pheasants.

By 1871, when the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society was able to report that pheasants were “thoroughly established and needing no further importations,” pheasants were apparently abundant in all settled areas of the mainland. Soon afterwards, their numbers declined rapidly and by the turn of the century they were rare in most parts of the country. The real cause of this decline remained a mystery for many years. At the time it was largely attributed to the introduction of phosphorous poisoning to control rabbits; but while this was a significant factor, it does not, with hindsight, appear to be the major one. The squatter types muttered about poaching, but the effect of this traditional activity was marginal. A disease epidemic, also suggested at the time, was later discounted, and in the early 1900 s a simple ecological explanation for the decline of the pheasant was advanced. It may

be summed up in one word: competition. .

From about the mid-1860s small European birds such as sparrows, blackbirds, thrushes, starlings, and finches were established in New Zealand in large numbers. Probably it was these, rather than the poisoned oats, the hawks, ferrets, wekas, wild cats, and owls which wiped out the pheasants.

For wiped out read “starved out.” The small arboreal birds increased so rapidly and foraged so efficiently that there was an insufficient supply of insects to sustain the larger ground-dwell-ing birds as well. In Canterbury, both the pheasant and the native weka declined rapidly after the small birds were established.

This theory is not new; it was first put forward more than 70 years ago by the noted botanist and naturalist, T. F. Cheeseman, who wrote that the small birds “have literally starved out the pheasants, which scarcely manage to keep themselves alive

during the winter months, and, when the breeding season arrives, they are not in a fit state to reproduce their species.” While it is an oversimplifiction to say that this was the sole reason for the decline of the pheasant, it does illustrate the fact that in the early years of settlement, and well into the present century, insufficient attention was paid to the complex ecological consequences that

could follow the introduction of new species of plants and animals. It is not a lot of consolation that these blunders are now understood. In the case of pheasants their numbers have slowly been increasing in recent years, and this suggests that the early blunders may at least be undergoing slowly a process of natural correction.