The ring-necked pheasant is the world's classic gamebird
Phasianus colchicus, native across Asia and into Caucasus foothills of Europe, may be the most widespread ancient gamebird of global importance. Introductions for sport remapped its range onto farmlands far from the Black and Caspian seas where it began.
Also called ring-necked or blue-headed pheasant, this phasianid is familiar to hunters on several continents. The original distribution ran from the eastern Black Sea and Caspian region eastward through much of Asia. Japan's green pheasant is sometimes treated as a separate species; hybrids are fertile, so species limits stay debated among taxonomists.
The species name means of Colchis, the Black Sea land in modern Georgia where Europeans first met the bird. A popular story says Greek colonists carried pheasants to the Balkans in the sixth century BC, but Balkan pheasant bones date back to the sixth millennium BC, so the birds were there first. Britain had them by around AD 1059, possibly earlier through the Romano-British, and by 1950 they bred across the British Isles; roughly 47 million are released there each year for shooting. North American introductions began in 1773, with the first big success in Oregon's Willamette Valley in 1881, and South Dakota alone now bags over a million birds a year.
A nominate male runs 60 to 89 centimetres, almost 50 of them tail, with gold and copper-red barring shot through with green and purple; hens are dull mottled brown and 50 to 63 centimetres long. Captive breeding, crosses between subspecies and constant releases have produced males from nearly white to almost black. In the wild they favour grassland near water with scattered copses, and heavily cleared farmland cannot sustain populations for long. Southern Hemisphere introductions mostly failed except where native gamebirds were absent.
Source: Common pheasant
