Posted: Dec. 5, 2010

Eric Sharp

Nice place to hunt pheasant, quail

By ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS OUTDOORS WRITER

HERSEY -- They call it Shooting the Breeze Hunt Club because it seems the wind always blows over these rolling hills. The way it was whipping snow over the landscape this day, it felt as if the glaciers that carved up the country were barely out of sight.

Those glaciers left a wonderful legacy for upland bird hunters, a scene of hummocks and hollows, marshes and savannas, where the owners are bringing back native plants like the big bluestem and wild sunflowers that covered the country before it was cleared for farms.

The bird that held the interest of Jazz, a 9-year-old English setter, was far from a native. It was a ring-necked pheasant that was released at the club by part-owner, guide and dog trainer Tim Fox. And while the bird had been freed on a hilltop, it had since taken refuge in a dense clump of marsh grass a quarter-mile away.

It was fascinating to watch the dog pick up the pheasant's scent from 30 yards off, slink in toward it like a small, white ninja, then lock up on point 3 feet away with eyes trained on the bird like lasers.

Fox walked in and kicked the clump to force the bird to fly, and it dropped in a harvested field under a fusillade of shotgun blasts from the four hunters following Jazz.
Shooting the Breeze (just north of Big Rapids) is a good example of how land can be managed to maximize the survival of game birds like pheasants and quail. The 390 acres offer everything that pheasants require at different times of the year -- spring nesting cover, summer roosting cover and winter survival cover, all near food sources.
Some surveys have shown that predators like foxes, opossums, weasels and skunks destroy up to 75% of the pheasant nests in an area, largely because there is so little cover that predators easily can find the few nesting areas.

And while some farms offer huge winter feeding areas, the birds often must cross big open areas to reach the food, where they are vulnerable to hawks and owls as well as mammalian predators.

At Shooting the Breeze, uncut corn and sorghum plots are surrounded by grassy areas and marshes. And there is also good winter cover, plants that bend under deep snow but don't crush to the ground. That creates a network of tunnels under the snow where the birds can sit safely when they aren't feeding.

Yet despite the ideal habitat, Fox finds little evidence of natural breeding and figures that only about 1%-2% of the 5,000 birds released here each year manage to reproduce.

Ring-necked pheasants were so common in Michigan in the mid-20th Century that many people thought they were native, but they're an exotic species. Pheasants were introduced to Michigan before 1900 and by 1925 were common enough to support a hunting season.

The farms of the Thumb, with their mixed crops, miles of tree rows and hedgerows and brush-choked roadside ditches, proved to be a pheasant Eden. Between natural reproduction and planted birds raised by the state and 4-H groups, the pheasant population exploded. By the 1940s, hunters were killing more than a million a year and pheasants outranked deer hunting in popularity.

Michigan pheasant numbers went through boom and bust cycles until about 1970. Then permanent changes in agricultural practices, including mowing and planting roadside ditches and fencerows and the introduction of single-crop fields from horizon to horizon, sent the birds into a steep and steady decline.

Fields in Washtenaw, Oakland, Macomb and even Wayne counties that had been superb pheasant habitats were buried under thousands of square miles of roadways, commercial buildings, parking lots and housing developments.

While parts of the Thumb still offer good pheasant populations, in the rest of the state pheasants are found mostly where landowners manage intensely for them.

Michigan still has a regular pheasant season Oct. 1-Nov. 14 in the Lower Peninsula, Oct. 10-31 in a limited part of the southwest Upper Peninsula, and Dec. 1-Jan. 1 in the southeastern Lower Peninsula.

But finding birds is difficult, and getting permission to hunt them can be even harder. That's why game bird preserves have become so popular with hunters, especially those who own bird dogs.

Fox said hunting fees at Shooting the Breeze are $350 a day for two hunters, which includes a guide, dog and eight to 12 pheasants. The hunters also can take quail, paying $10 for each one they kill. Groups of four hunters get a discounted rate of $400-$500, which includes 16-32 pheasants. The club also provides meals.
That's attractive to a lot of hunters who otherwise would have to spend considerably more money and time to drive with their own dogs to Iowa and the Dakotas, or spend days covering pheasant-free zones in Michigan in hopes of coming across a few stragglers.

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