Raising pheasants is no game

In the months before the Mid-Valley pheasant hunts of autumn, two Sutter County breeders nurture the hunters' future quarry.

Changes in agriculture have produced wider swaths of cleared land lacking the grasses and underbrush that conceal pheasants — and their ground-level nests — from predators such as owls, coyotes and hawks, something local pheasant breeders say make their work as important as ever.

"The way farming practices are now makes it tough for birds to survive," said Larry Munger, a rancher and 16-year Sutter County supervisor in the midst of raising 14,000 of the game birds this season. "I can take you places that in the '60s were like jungles, just teeming with birds. We've lost those jungles that used to be their refuge."

One of the nation's most popular game birds, ring-necked pheasants are relative newcomers to California and the North American continent. Natives of China, the birds began to be introduced stateside in the 1880s and have become established from the Midwest to the western states — but only with repeated human efforts to release more.

On a ranch east of Sutter, Munger and his family have spent more than 20 years raising ring-necked pheasants to sell to hunting clubs in the Sacramento Valley and as far away as the North Coast. What began as a Future Farmers of America project by his sons has evolved into Yuba-Sutter's main hatchery for the game birds.

A collection of sheds and pens roofed with low-hanging netting, the Munger family's pheasant tract raises about 14,000 birds a year. After hens lay their glossy, pottery-hued eggs starting in March, warmed incubation rooms shelter the eggs for more than three weeks before hatching, thousands at a time.

Another five months pass before the pheasants reach their adult forms — the females in demure tan plumage with black spots, the larger males covered in the eye-catching livery of orange, green and white they flaunt as a form of courtship.

More than 4,000 of Munger's birds are used by the South Butte Gun Club, with the breeder selling the rest to other clubs for the October-to-February hunting season.

Shortly past sunrise on a late June morning, Munger and a half-dozen ranch hands set to work, patiently but briskly adorning the beaks of hundreds of 6-week-old, still gray-feathered male pheasants with red plastic clips called blinders. The clips partially block the birds' vision to keep them from too easily catching sight of other males — a step needed to keep the naturally belligerent birds from pecking and assaulting one another, sometimes to death.

Despite decades of systematic breeding to keep up recreational hunting, Sutter County pheasant raisers pointed to a nature only slightly domesticated, a fierce independence never far from the surface of their charges.

"They're very high-strung and stress out easily," said Bob Fremd, a Chicago native and retired rice farmer who oversees about 1,000 pheasants southwest of Yuba City. "What mine do is fly into things and break their necks. They're wild birds; they're looking 24-7 to get out — that's what they do best."

Said Munger, "You'd think as we're the first thing they see, you would be the first thing imprinted on them, but you're not. It's in their instincts to be wild."

Despite their flighty nature, though, Fremd called his 15 years at his craft not only an avocation but a way to sustain one of the Mid-Valley's draws — and signatures.

"My grandfather, my wife's grandfather and father, they were all avid hunters — occasionally just to put meat on the table," he said. "It's a way of life for the hunters. It's just part of the fabric of the people up here."