Are pheasants stupid? (3 Viewers)

[Ken Hall]

I've always thought that pheasants must have been last in the queue when brains were being handed out. Of course there is always one that breaks the mould isn't that how evolution works? This female has started coming to the garden, and seems to have mastered how to reach the seed feeder. She is actually standing on the seed tray below, not on the fence, but I couldn't get a clear shot of it. Maybe I'll confuse her by moving things further apart. :-O:-O

 

[TwoDipsfromAmsterdam]

No birds (or animals) are stupid . They do their thing for the environment they are meant to exist in. Sometimes the environment and the rules change.

Humans are stupid.

I'm not sure I would go along with the "Humans are stupid" idea, although I think I know where you're coming from. How many pheasants could develop life-saving drugs, reach the moon, access the Internet, care for sick relatives for long periods, etc, etc. Of course, it's equally true that not many could start wars, deliberately start bush fires, destroy their habitat, etc, etc.

To adapt Shakespeare: some humans are born stupid, some achieve stupidity and some have stupidity thrust upon them.

DiP

 

[Wells-man]

The thing that strikes me about pheasants, with the exception of my current visiting super-pheasant, is that their behaviour seems counter to survival. We gets quite a few of them near our (semi-rural) house, and often the first I'll know of one nearby is when it runs away squawking loudly, thereby attracting attention to itself and, if I were a shooter, pretty much ensuring its own death. Hardly survival of the brightest is it? Though to be fair, I suppose it might be a strategy that has developed to distract predators from the nest.

I remember one particular occasion when I ws driving along a quiet country lane, finding about 20 -30 pheasants, nearly all male, standing literally in the middle of the road. They had no idea at all of danger or caution... bred purely as cannon fodder. Reminded me of the Monty Python village idiots.

Pheasants do seem to be shown up in the intelligence stakes by the red-legged partridges, which in contrast, although presumably also bred in capacity to provide 'sport' are much cannier.. and rely a lot on group safety tactics. We often get 6 to 12 of them together in our garden, and in contrast to the nearly tame pheasant they are very wary indeed.

K.

 

[Himalaya]

Would wild pheasants beas stupid as released pheasants?

Pheasants are probably adapted to the wilds of Asia where they have plenty of cover and a different type of predator to contend with.
I see plenty of dead pheasants obviously hit by vehicles. Then again theres no shortages of the wily Fox dead on motorways, roads too.

 

[mikfoz]

From an evolutionary standpoint, Pheasants don't seem to have too much trouble passing on their genes to the next generation at the moment.