Good day chasing NH Pheasants

[Steve Hodges]

Originally Posted by Pete Lester

Dean it's always been put and take pheasant hunting in NH however there was a time there was a lot more put. Up until 1973 New Hampshire Fish & Game raised their own pheasants at a pheasant farm they owned and operated. They stocked birds in the spring as well as in the fall. The birds they stocked in the spring would breed in the wild. As a teen I tried to be careful when mowing hay with a sickle bar mower to not run over a nest but that was not always possible and every now and then I would have to stop the tractor and get off to ring the neck of a legless hen that sat on the nest when the mower passed. There were also stockings done by gun clubs such as Major Waldrons which raised pheasants as well. The pheasant stocking took a very bad turn for the worse when Governor Thompson ordered the NH F&G pheasant farm be burned to the ground due to the fear of it spreading Equine Encephalitis . Since then the NH pheasants have been much smaller birds and far less wild to hunt.

Pete, were the pheasants then stocked in the spring in the whole state or just in the seacoast area? I do not recall seeing any pheasants in the Lakes Region other than in the fall stocking, but I could have missed them i guess.

[J.B. Books]

Originally Posted by Stephen Hodges

Pete, were the pheasants then stocked in the spring in the whole state or just in the seacoast area? I do not recall seeing any pheasants in the Lakes Region other than in the fall stocking, but I could have missed them i guess.

I couldn't tell you, I was a teenager at the time and I didn't have to venture very far to hunt and I was still learning, I could walk to places that had pheasants back then. As a boy I can remember one occasion of seeing a hen pheasant with a brood of chicks in a neighbors yard. The number of stocking sites in the seacoast of NH has declined tremendously. I have a childhood memory of sitting in the car while my father was getting some groceries at Dan's Star Market on Central Ave in Dover and watching a man and his dog flush and shoot a pheasant where Dover Bowl and the strip mall next to it stand today. Imagine that or imagine shooting pheasants right behind Wentworth Douglas Hospital, which you could into the mid 1980's.