Nebraskaland

44 Nebraskaland • April 2022 can remember the fi rst rooster pheasant I ever held as a kid, standing over the trash can in our garage helping my dad clean birds and thinking that this brown, purple, blue, red and green iridescent thing might just be too pretty to pluck. And I'm sure I did think "pluck" — skinning a bird at that time would have been completely foreign to me. Pheasants were rare table fare. Being the fi fth generation in a town in eastern Nebraska where the Platte and Loup rivers meet, our family fi rst and foremost hunted ducks. Sure, we'd sit in the deer stand once in a while. And we might abandon the duck blind now and again to walk a weedy towhead and answer the taunt of a ringneck crowing across the channel on a bluebird day. But until I took a job as a Pheasants Forever Farm Bill biologist in northeastern Nebraska at age 23, the only thing I could have told you about pheasant hunting was that hunters wore bright orange and had to walk through the fi eld in a line. Birds of a Different Feather As duck hunters coming of age in the early 2000s, my siblings and I were reaping the benefi ts of the conservation eff orts of generations before us. Regulated harvest, management and international cooperation to benefi t migratory waterfowl had begun with the landmark passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in 1918. When the droughts of the "Dirty Thirties" helped underline that science- driven habitat management and protection were an essential part of the equation, we got the Federal Duck Stamp, the expansion of National Wildlife Refuges and Ducks Unlimited. Waterfowl management and habitat development and protection picked up again after World War II and have gained momentum since. By the time I was old enough to shoulder my grandpa's old .410, the only thing most Platte River duck hunters felt they really needed to do was buy their duck stamps and permits every year, spend some money at the DU banquet, pick a good spot for the blind and get the decoys ready to go. Every fall, when the weather turned, ducks and geese would show up from some magical place up north. Pheasant hunting, however, has a far diff erent backstory. Pheasants aren't magically created in a far- off place and delivered to us on a cold north wind. Pheasants are homegrown, intimately tied to how economy, policy and technology shape the landscape right here in our own neighborhood. We don't get to share the load with other places, as is the case with waterfowl: letting Canada, Alaska and the Dakotas handle nesting and brood-rearing, while the southern United States and northern Mexico handle wintering needs. The average home range of a pheasant is 1.5 square miles, so places where people want pheasants need to have it all. The Good Old Days In my 12 years of learning to become a pheasant hunter, early lessons included opportunities to hunt over pointing dogs, how and where to look for birds in diff erent types of weather, and the value of good boots and wearing something just a little thicker than plain old jeans. I also learned that in many ways, pheasant hunters were a lot like the duck hunters I had grown up with — there was the passion and dedication, the appreciation of camaraderie and tradition, and sharing good stories and memories. Of course, a day with lots of action never hurt. In some ways, pheasant hunting was duck hunting fl ipped on its head. Where I had grown up listening to stories of scarcity in the old days of waterfowl hunting — of waiting all morning, morning after morning, and being excited just to see a fl ock or a Canada goose fl y that stretch of river for the fi rst time — pheasant hunters' stories of the "good old days" Rarer Than a Three-Spurred Rooster By Cassidy Wessel, Wildlife Biologist I

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