Ring-necked pheasants rely most heavily on waste grain from crop fields, wild and cultivated grass and forb seeds, fruits and leaves. Crop field seeds include corn, wheat, grain sorghum, barley, oats and sunflowers. Nongrain seeds include legumes, ragweed, smartweed and burdock. Hard and soft mast in the summer and fall diet include acorns, pine seeds and wild berries. In their first five weeks after hatching, chicks eat insects almost exclusively. Adults also eat insects, including grasshoppers, crickets, beetles and caterpillars through the spring and summer months. The foods pheasants eat supplies them with the water they need.

Nesting cover

Dense ground cover with good overhead growth is the key. Alfalfa, wheat stubble, cool-season grasses, and native and tame pastures work well. Grassy field corners and odd areas, shelter-belts, field borders and fence rows are also used.

Brood rearing cover

Pheasants want vegetation that is somewhat open near the ground for easy chick travel, with overhead concealment. Native bunch grasses like big and little bluestem, switchgrass, sideoats grama, wheat grasses and Indiangrass offer this structure. Mixed cool-season grasses with forbs and other vegetation that support insects are also used.

Roosting, escape cover

Ringnecks roost in small trees and tall shrubs, or on the ground in weedy ditches, cattail swales, brush heaps and briar patches.

Winter cover

Weedy field borders and fence rows, dense, upright grasslands, abandoned farmsteads, cattail marshes, and evergreen and hardwood windbreaks are good protection in winter.

Interspersion

A good mixture of differing habitat types next to one another is part of the habitat package pheasants need. To attract pheasants and maintain their populations, offer foraging, nesting, brood-rearing, roosting, winter and escape cover in close proximity. A complex of corn, sorghum and small grain crop fields, unmowed haylands, native prairie grasses, unmowed field borders, windbreaks and cattail marshes should do well.

— Reprinted from Wildlife Habitat Management Institute’s “Wildlife Habitat Basics.”