The Hegins-Gratz Valley Wild Pheasant Recovery Area in northern Dauphin and western Schuylkill counties today was dissolved by the Pennsylvania Board of Game Commissioners.
According to the Game Commission, few wild pheasants remain in the WPRA, which is not expected to meet the goals of the wild pheasant program of growing a wild, sustainable and huntable population of pheasants.
In 2011, the commission released 300 wild pheasants into the 36,000-acre WPRA. The birds were trapped in the wild in the western U.S.
Dissolving the WPRA clears the way for the commission to resume stocking game farm-raised pheasants for hunters to pursue on a put-and-take basis. Most pheasant hunting, dog training and pheasant stocking are not permitted in a WPRA.
WPRAs are those areas the commission chose because of their potential for habitat “to establish a sustainable wild pheasant population that can be hunted.”
There were 4 WPRAs attempted, each one receiving stockings of pheasants trapped in the wild in western states, where wild pheasant populations have been established over the long term. WPRAs also were protected against pheasant hunting and dog training to allow the stocked pheasants to get established and begin breeding. Habitat improvements were made in cooperation with landowners.
A WPRA in Somerset County was dissolved previously.
Commissioners also voted to shrink the 2 remaining WPRAs: Franklin, down from 62,000 acres to 19,000, and Central Susquehanna in Columbia, Montour and Northumberland counties, down from 97,000 acres to 31,000 acres.
They further voted to remove the March 1 through July 31 prohibition on dog-training within WPRAs, deciding there is a “low likelihood of negative impacts from dog training on currently established pheasant populations.”
Outside of the WPRAs, pheasant hunting in Pennsylvania is almost entirely a matter of pursuing pheasants that have been stocked by the Game Commission, which last year released 218,510 pheasants for hunters to pursue, most of them on state game lands.
Modern pheasant hunting is only a shadow of what it was during the peak days of pheasants in the state. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, pheasants were flourishing in Pennsylvania with annual harvests estimated at more than a million birds.
The peak came in 1971, when hunters harvested an estimated 1.3 million pheasants.
Pheasants, which are native to Asia, were part of the Pennsylvania landscape nearly statewide in the 1960s and early 1970s. Hens with broods of chicks trailing them were common sights across rural Pennsylvania.
In addition to that naturally reproducing population, the commission and local sportsmen’s clubs were releasing hundreds of thousands of pheasants each year.
Production in commission game farms hit an all-time high of 425,217 pheasants in 1983. As noted earlier, slightly more than 200,000 are currently released each year by the commission.
The Game Commission intends the birds to find their way into hunters' game bags, but some are lost to other impacts, from predators to cars.
Another big part of the decline in pheasants in Pennsylvania has been loss of farmland, which dropped from nearly 8.2 million acres in 1974 to about 7.6 million acres in 2017.
In addition, according to the commission, “economic trends in agriculture intensified farming practices, herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers increased substantially in use. Increased row crop acreage, urban developments, and the elimination of fencerows on agricultural lands also are thought to have accelerated the decline in pheasant populations.”
And, two hard winters in 1977 and 1978 further depressed pheasant populations. The commission attempted to offset declining populations by mass producing and releasing more pheasants, but it soon became apparent that that only resulted in a bird of reduced quality, with a loss of hardiness and increased tameness.
Partly in response to declining pheasant numbers and places to hunt pheasants, but also as part of overall declines in participation in hunting, the number of hunters has fallen from a peak high of more than 700,000 in 1971 to about 75,000 in 2016.