Game Birds

In the rural Belfair Valley near the Union River, almost at the base of Gold Mountain, a man keeps pheasants in a pen that is easily seen from Wilkinson Road. Until yesterday, I thought he raised them there. That’s when I rode by on my bike to see this year’s flock, something I do every fall, along with checking out the salmon runs in local creeks.

The pheasants are kept in a big pen, roughly 40 feet by 15 feet with a couple of hutches in the center. Yesterday perhaps 200 birds were in the enclosure, split about evenly between cocks and hens. They were in constant motion but surprisingly quiet as they shuffled about on the straw-covered ground or made short experimental flights to the pen’s rafters. The males are colorful, almost ornate, with reddish-orange breasts, dark green heads, red eye patches, and a distinctive white neck band. In contrast, the females are plain, a dull mottled mixture of browns and grays.

Because of the cool climate and lack of grain farming, wild pheasants don’t reproduce abundantly enough in Western Washington to support upland bird hunting. And so, like trout and salmon, humans help supplement their numbers through a release program. That will be the fate of these birds the owner told me. Next week they will be released locally, at Hunter Farms or near Belfair. He doesn’t actually raise the pheasants though. His pen is a staging area, not a game farm. During hunting season, several flocks will be trucked in, kept there for a week or so, and then released to take their chances against hunters and other predators. The bag limit is two per day of either sex.