Pheasant and Quail Habitat Blends for Cover and Winter Food

A few acres of grass can hold nesting hens in June and sit empty in January. Upland birds move between four separate pieces of habitat across the year, and a stand that supplies one of them loses the birds for the rest.

Pheasants and bobwhite quail need nesting cover in spring, insect rich brood range in summer, thermal cover that stays upright under snow, and food within reach of that cover. Pheasants alone need a minimum of 30 to 60 acres of safe, undisturbed nesting cover [1], more than most private tracts carry. Each piece asks for a different seed mix.

What Do Upland Birds Need on a Few Acres?

The pieces are not interchangeable, and a deficiency in any one of them shows up in the autumn bird count.

Bobwhite work ground on a similar scale. Radio marked birds at one Arkansas refuge averaged a breeding season home range of 63.9 hectares, close to 158 acres [3].

Smaller places still hold birds. Your acreage is one piece of a neighborhood, and the piece missing locally is the one worth planting.

Four pieces carry a brood or a covey through the year:

• Nesting cover: standing grass from last season, dense enough to hide a hen from above
• Brood range: open ground at chick height, with broadleaf plants and the insects they hold
• Winter cover: stiff stemmed grass, shrubs, or cattail that stands up under snow
• Winter food: seed or grain close enough to that cover to reach in a storm

Cattail is the benchmark for winter cover where a wetland exists. Where one does not, switchgrass and other stiff stemmed natives hold their form through a blizzard.

What Makes Good Nesting Cover?

A hen hides her nest from overhead and from the side, and that takes dense, erect vegetation at least 8 to 12 inches high [1]. Residual growth from last season does most of that work, because the earliest nests go in before new growth is tall enough to cover anything.

Bunchgrasses suit nesting better than sod forming grasses. A bunchgrass grows in a clump and leaves bare ground between plants, so a hen can walk in and a chick can move through the litter instead of fighting a mat of stems.

Little bluestem, sideoats grama, and big bluestem build that structure, and a native prairie mix carries several of those bunchgrasses in one bag.

Why Does Forb Diversity Drive Chick Survival?

Chicks do not eat seed at first. They eat insects, and the forbs in a mix are what hold the insects. A forb is a broadleaf flowering plant that is not a grass, and a stand without forbs is a poor nursery.

Through their first several weeks, pheasant chicks feed almost exclusively on the larval and instar stages of pollinator insects [1]. By the third week of life, insects still constitute about 70 percent of the diet [2].

Partridge pea, black eyed Susan, purple prairie clover, and a few more broadleaf species usually carry more insect life than grass on its own. A perennial wildflower mix is the simplest way to spread bloom dates across a small block, so something is flowering whenever chicks are on the ground.

Where Should a Winter Food Strip Go?

Available food matters in the weeks when snow covers everything else, and the value of a strip depends on its position.

Corn and grain sorghum retain grain on the stalk and stand up in winter weather. Wheat, soybeans, millets, rye, and buckwheat feed birds too, but snow often buries them and forces birds into the open to reach the seed [1]. Corn and sorghum also stand two years without reseeding [4].

Placement determines whether birds use the plot at all.

Large plots belong directly next to woody or heavy herbaceous winter cover, on the windward side, generally the northwest, so the plot catches blowing snow before it reaches the cover [1]. Pheasants hesitate to feed beyond a half mile from cover even when food sits past that line [1].

Size follows the cover already on the ground. Plots of 3 to 10 acres do the most against winter storms, and a square block outperforms a long narrow strip [1]. Three acres is the floor where winter cover is lacking [4], and Pheasants Forever pushes past 10 acres on ground where winter cover is scarce [1].

How Much Seed Do You Need, and When Do You Plant?

Native habitat mixes are priced and seeded on pure live seed, or PLS, the share of a bag that is live, plantable seed rather than chaff and dead seed.

Rates of 3 to 5 pounds of PLS per acre suit a large part of the pheasant range [1]. Most nesting mixes are figured at 20 to 35 pure live seeds per square foot [1].

Establishment timing divides into two approaches. Dormant seeding goes in late fall, once soil is too cold to germinate, so the seed sits in place and breaks dormancy on its own schedule. Frost seeding goes onto late winter ground, where freeze and thaw cycles work seed into the surface.

Year one looks like failure and usually is not. Native grasses and forbs allocate most of the first season to root development, so the stand above ground can appear thin and weedy while it establishes underneath.

The Management Most Owners Skip

A grass stand accumulates litter every season it is left undisturbed, and an excessively thick stand stops functioning as habitat. Bare ground closes in, and chicks lose the open floor they require in order to move and feed.

Rotational disturbance maintains a stand in the condition birds use: light disking in strips, mowing part of the field, or burning a block at a time.

Controlled burning on a three or four year rotation is a primary management tool for warm season grasses [1], and haying segments of a field on a three year rotation keeps the vegetation rejuvenated [1]. Habitat contracts usually require one of those treatments partway through the term, for the same reason.

Treating part of the ground each year keeps cover from ending up all one age.

Common Mistakes on Small Acreage

Three mistakes account for most of the empty looking cover on small tracts:

• A single introduced cool season grass, which mats into sod a chick cannot walk through
• Mowing during the nesting season, which takes the nests and next spring’s residual cover with it
• A food plot set out of reach, so birds cross open ground to feed and pay for the trip

Match the seed to the piece you are short on rather than to the whole property at once: a nesting mix on the block you can leave undisturbed, a food strip on the windward edge of your best winter cover. If you are laying out cover and food for pheasants or quail this season, shop the upland game blends for your region and pair a nesting mix with a winter food strip for your acreage.

Sources

[1] Pheasants Forever. Pheasant Habitat Essentials Guide. https://pheasantsforever.org/what-we-do/habitat-conservation/pheasant-habitat-essentials-guide/

[2] PLOS ONE. Health status of free-ranging ring-necked pheasant chicks (Phasianus colchicus) in North-Western Germany. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0234044

[3] PMC, Ecology and Evolution. Assessment of northern bobwhite survival and fitness in the West Gulf Coastal Plain ecoregion. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6049910/

[4] Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. Wildlife Food Plots on CRP Acres. https://www.extension.iastate.edu/Pages/communications/CRP/FOODPL.html