Thanksgiving Day, 26 November 2020

This month bird photographer friends Steve Gosser and Cris Hamilton have not taken many pictures of wild turkeys in western Pennsylvania but they have certainly found photogenic ring-necked pheasants. As Steve said on Facebook:

The last two weekends I’ve been driving around everywhere trying to find some of the rare winter finches currently moving down through our area, but all I keep finding are Pheasants. 

— Steve Gosser on Facebook, 15 November 2020

Males pheasants are bold and colorful with blue head feathers that they can raise like horns (click here to see).

The females are brown but not boring. Both sexes perk up when a human appears on the scene, pausing and staring as if to say, “What is that person doing?” Sometimes they run.

Native to Asia, ring-necked pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) were introduced as game birds in Europe, North America, Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand (see map). They’ve never become invasive because the pen-raised birds lack the survival skills they need to make it long term in the wild. Pausing to stare is probably their downfall.(*)

Why are ring-necked pheasants so plentiful in western PA? They’re stocked every year by the Pennsylvania Game Commission. Here are some high counts of ring-necked pheasant releases in 2019:

• 1,470 at SGL 203 in Marshall Twp Allegheny County
• 3,640 at SGL 95 (The Glades) in Butler County
• 1,920 at SGL 284 (Schollards Wetlands / Pennsy Swamp / Black Swamp) in Mercer / Lawrence County

Click on the screenshot to see the interactive map of 2019 pheasant releases or here for the list of releases in 2020.

Cheers to ring-necked pheasants.

Happy Thanksgiving!

p.s. I’m thankful for all the photographers who let me use their photos. These are by Steve Gosser and Cris Hamilton.

(*) Pheasants are birds of open land. They did well when much of Pennsylvania was farmland but now that the state has reverted to forest wild turkeys are doing well and pheasants are not.

Eurasia is home to wild rock pigeons (Columba livia) where people domesticated them for food and fancy (Columba livia domestica). 10,000 years later there are a thousand different breeds. Some are pets. Some are messengers. Some are racing pigeons. But have you ever heard of stunt pigeons? Birmingham rollers? They were news to me last week.

Birmingham rollers are popular domestic pigeons that were first bred in Birmingham, England for their tendency to do backward somersaults in flight. Some of them spin so rapidly that they look like a plummeting ball but they recover and continue flying. Pigeon fanciers enter them in competitions with high points for multiple birds tumbling at the same time.

Much of this video is in slow motion show you can see how the pigeons move.

Some pigeon breeders have taken things a step further by selecting to the point where the rollers cannot fly, merely tumble backwards on the ground. Clearly these birds would not survive in the wild. (Compilation video includes footage from the one above.)

Knowing peregrine falcons as I do, I can imagine what one thinks when it sees a Birmingham roller in flight. Mmmm hmmm!

p.s. Thank you to Scott Young for telling me about Birmingham rollers.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons; click on the caption to see the original)

If you’ve ever visited Key West, Florida you’ve noticed that feral chickens roam the streets. Nicknamed gypsy chickens they are descendants of domestic jungle fowl brought to the islands in the 1800s and 1950s for meat and cockfighting. Some of their ancestors escaped captivity but many were released when cockfighting was outlawed in the 1970s. They are doing so well that their population periodically explodes.

Life is pretty easy for a gypsy chicken. They have few predators and even those who are trapped and transported to the mainland during population explosions become free range chickens at safe participating farms.

However, one thing goes wrong for them. When people feed them disease spreads easily through their population and many chickens die. That’s what’s happening this fall as described by Key West Animal Rescue:

While it’s common for the wild chickens to get sick this time of year due to natural occurring bacteria in the soil, the City of Key West posted, “there is a larger than usual outbreak of botulism killing the birds, and feeding them can be lethal.”

— Key West Animal Rescue Site, Sick Feral Chickens, 28 Sept 2020

Key West Chicken Rescue tries to save them.

The calls continue to come in about chickens found lying on the ground that are too weak to stand with their eyes closed. The rescue is hard at work saving as many sick birds as possible.

— Key West Animal Rescue Site, Sick Feral Chickens, 28 Sept 2020

Meanwhile the City of Key West has put out a plea to stop feeding the chickens.

As with many well intentioned things feeding the chickens ends badly for the birds. They get poor nutrition, disease spreads in the flock, they start fighting, and they lose their normal nomadic ways. It’s all described on this local poster.

Please don’t feed the gypsy chickens.

(photo from Wikimedia Commons, poster from Key West Chicken Rescue on Facebook; click on the captions to see the originals)

Wild turkey flocks are going through changes, declining here, expanding there.

In Pennsylvania their population declined 24% in the past two decades. At their peak in the early 2000’s there were 280,000 statewide. This year there are only 212,200. The graph below shows the turkeys’ rise and fall, 1995 to 2013, carefully tracked by the PA Game Commission (PGC) because turkeys are a game bird.

The Game Commission notes that their decline is from a combination of factors:

• Negative habitat changes: mono-culture farms, invasive plants, less food (fewer insects, acorns, beech nuts, etc), and less cover (declines in shrubby cover).
• Unpredictable weather and extreme weather events when poults are young
• An increase in predators, especially in poor cover areas.

In response to the downward trend the Game Commission lowered the harvest limits so there is less hunting pressure on the birds. They are also studying whether any disease has had a significant effect.

Pennsylvania is not alone. Wild turkeys are declining across the eastern U.S. from western New York state to Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri.

But not in New England.

Fifty years ago there weren’t any turkeys in Massachusetts but a modest reintroduction effort in the 1970’s (37 birds) turned the tide. They now have 25,000 turkeys and the population keeps growing.

Wild turkeys are especially abundant on Cape Cod where there’s plenty of food and cover and very little hunting. Flocks roam the neighborhoods, scratch for grubs in grass and gardens, and challenge small dogs and people when they feel threatened.

Wild turkeys have pretty much taken over. Here’s a flock in Bob Kroeger’s yard during a Nor’easter in March 2018.

If you’re missing turkeys here in Pennsylvania, I know you’ll find them there.

(photos taken on Cape Cod by Bob Kroeger, graph from the PA Game Commission; click on the caption to see the original)

Have you seen white doves hanging out at the feeders? Where do they come from?

In June they might be Wedding Doves.

Click the link above to read about their origin in a vintage article from 2012.