If you have hunted long enough, you have heard your share of old wives' tales. One that sticks out to me is after a tough weekend of public land pheasant hunting, my dad returned to work to be told that he shouldn’t wear blaze orange because pheasants can see it coming. Now, considering it’s against the law in Iowa to hunt without at least a blaze orange hat, we just brushed it off and moved on with our lives.
The most recent wife tale I have come across happened as I finished up a pheasant hunt on a new block of public ground not far from my house. I had seen 7 pheasants sitting in the field the day before and with decent pheasant habitat I thought I’d give it a try after walking and having no success I was greeted by a white GMC Canyon sitting in the parking lot. At first, I thought I was about to get scolded for unknowingly trespassing, but this guy was just like me checking out the new patch of public ground. News travels fast in my area. After a short conversation, he brought up something that I had never heard of before. He claimed that pheasant and turkey compete for ground and don’t get along. It struck me as odd at first but as I started thinking about it it kind of made sense. Iowa is a good example of this. The majority of the pheasant population is on the western half of the state, while the good turkey hunting I know is on the eastern side where there are relatively low pheasant numbers. This piqued my interest so I started to dig. Here is what I found.
Of the top 5 states to turkey hunt in zero lined up with the top 5 to pheasant. Correlation does not equal causation so I looked deeper. I wasn’t able to find any reasonable study within the last hundred years to back this claim. The only study I could find was done in 1930 and according to what I read on Pheasant Forever about it, more studies have disproven this claim since, and very few if any have proved it to be true. So the question is where does this wives' tale come from? Is it because of people who have an experience like me with seeing tons of turkey in places with no pheasant and vice versa? It’s easy to come to that conclusion when you just think about it for a second and move on with your life.
To me, the answer is even simpler than that. The answer is more than likely habitat. Pheasant tends to thrive in open prairies with plenty of food water and thick winter cover. Like cat tails and tall prairie grasses. Where turkey around me like big timber areas with bluffs and corn fields. What I would be curious to know is how Turkey and grouse get along as it seems to me that they are more likely to cross paths. It’s my assumption that there are plenty of resources and habitats to go around for both in areas where they thrive.
Wives tales can be a fun part of the hunting community. It’s a community of storytellers and legends. One should be careful not to fall too in love with them however because once you start pulling on the strings they tend to unravel quickly.