I’d like for you to think for a moment about your home. You’ve got your kitchen, your bathroom, your bed, and your living room. Food, water, cover, space. You’ve got all the habitat elements you need to survive, and they’re all arranged in a convenient way. Simple enough.
Now, let’s think about taking those elements and scattering them across an entire section, 640 acres. You’ve got your kitchen in one corner, a mile away in the next is your bathroom. Opposite your kitchen is the bedroom, and in the last corner is the living room, somewhere you can hang out, relax and let the kids roll around on the floor. Not real convenient huh!
We’ve got all the elements, but the arrangement is all out of whack. We could probably do ok in that environment, but it sure would take a lot of energy to get a midnight snack. I know I wouldn’t want to get up and walk a mile for a bowl of oatmeal.
Well that’s all fine and dandy, but let’s throw in a blizzard to make things interesting. What the heck, we’ll throw in a couple of man eating tigers as well… Whew, that changes things doesn’t it? Now that midnight snack isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s downright hazardous. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’d be getting out of bed. But, eventually you’d have to. You’d have to make the perilous journey to the kitchen, dodging man eating tigers and trying not to get lost in the whiteout along the way.
That’d be a tough life wouldn’t it? Not real conducive to stress free living. Well, that’s what pheasants on the Palouse face every day. They’ve got all the habitat components, but they’re missing one critical link… arrangement, proximity, convenience. When this critical link isn’t there, it’s not just a mere inconvenience; it predisposes them to higher levels of predation and, during winter storms, unsustainable expenditures of precious energy.
Pheasants are homebodies, living out their entire life within a home range of about one square mile. Over the past few decades, farms have gotten larger and much of the idle lands that created the interspersion of winter and nesting cover that pheasant needs got gobbled up along the way.
So think about that next time you drive across the Palouse; when you see a grass patch over here, a creek over there, and a brushy draw in some other far flung corner. These things are the elements pheasant need to live, they just some help with arrangement.
And now, as Paul Harvey would put it, you know the rest of the story.