Pheasants not your ordinary game birds
Jim Stabile - Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bird hunters who don't mind hunting among strangers will find the $40 pheasant and quail stamp a bargain.
There's not a pheasant-stocking gun club in the state with dues that low, commercial preserve hunting can cost close to $100 for three pheasants, clubs buy and stock birds for $10, more or less, more later in the season because the breeder has to spend more to feed birds longer, and semi-wild preserve memberships cost several hundred dollars a season.
So for the $40 required, plus a $28.50 hunting license, hunters can find plenty of sport with birds stocked three days a week at 25 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs). The Division of Fish and Wildlife is stocking 60,000 pheasants this year, starting with the first loads of the "Rockport Rockets" from the Rockport Game Farm that were turned loose for Saturday's opening of the small game season.
The birds are a special blend of English ring-neck pheasants, Korean Green pheasants and black-necked pheasant, a blend designed to produce strong flyers as well as good looking birds. Pheasants were brought to New Jersey, in fact, to this country, by hunters.
Hunting for wild pheasants went downhill around the time leghold traps were banned and predators that feed on eggs, chicks and mature ground-nesting birds increased, but the tradition continues via birds raised under wire, pheasants like those grown during 14 Rockport hatches from spring through early summer. When birds get big enough, they live in 34 acres of spacious pens.
Hunters' license money was used to buy 492 acres for the Division at Rockport in 1925, only 13 years after the Division purchased 133 acres and opened its first state fish hatchery at Hackettstown in 1912, long before anti-hunters started complaining about our sports and wanted to control the Fish and Game Council.
There were 4,230 pheasants stocked at seven North Jersey WMAs for the first day, and more will be stocked on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until Dec. 29. Black River, Berkshire Valley, Whittingham, Pequest, Walpack, plus the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area get the birds. The areas can be crowded at the start of each day's hunting, but there's usually plenty of room later in the day.
• Speedwell Lake will be stocked with 200 chunky rainbow trout and Mount Hope Pond will get 160 on Nov. 21 as part of the Division's Winter Trout Stocking Program that will provide anglers with 5,030 trout averaging 14-15 inches on that day and on Nov. 19 and 20 at 23 lakes and ponds around the state. The fish will have to be hand-loaded onto trucks because they're too big for the fish pump usually used to load Pequest Hatchery trucks.
• Fishermen who use kayaks have a new online kayak fishing magazine to check out at www.kayakfishingmagazine.net. Kayaks are ideal for carrying to fishing locations like the Passaic River, where njtrout.com last week had a photo of a kayak angler with a nice northern pike on the Passaic River . Northerns have been hitting all the way down to Elmwood Park.
Election recap
How about that election? Two legislators targeted by the New Jersey Outdoor Alliance, a political action committee formed less than four months ago, lost in District 12, Monmouth and Mercer counties. Sen. Ellen Karcher and Assemblyman Michael Panter, who anti-hunters got to sponsor legislation to kill the Fish and Game Council and let the governor name one with seven of his political appointees, lost despite spending six times as much as their opponents.
The same bill the duo sponsored would have forced deletion of "food and recreation" from Division regulations and emphasized "non-lethal management" of fish and wildlife. Jennifer Beck and her two running-mates who will replace Karcher, her anti-hunting Assembly candidate and a third candidate, spoke in support of hunting and the Outdoor Alliance at a big rally held Oct. 29.
Despite their loss, there's still plenty of work ahead because the Assembly has other legislators who do what anti-hunters tell them. But now hunters have a PAC equipped to work to oust legislators who cater to the extremists.
In a rut
The rut's been on full blast, as even non-hunters might notice when they see the increase in roadkills as bucks chase does in heat. There was a 10-point piebald from Camden County and a lot of big bucks pictured on newjerseyhunter.com, the head of Ohio's I&E section got a 275-pound 18-pointer out there with a crossbow, a Minnesota woman shot an all-white six-pointer, a guy I know got a piebald doe in Somerset County, and a reader said he saw a huge all-white 10-pointer in Hunterdon.
Also in Minnesota, a conservation officer shot the antlers off a dead 10-pointer that died locked to a 14-pointer that was freed after the shots, and another big buck shot by a hunter in another state had a four-point antler stuck in its right eye.
Bad news bear
Our oddest story was the Sussex County bear that broke onto a van to get candy, knocked off the emergency brake and crashed the van 40 feet away. The bear not only "drove" carelessly, it also left the scene.
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/SPORTS/711110348/1002
Jim Stabile - Sunday, November 11, 2007
Bird hunters who don't mind hunting among strangers will find the $40 pheasant and quail stamp a bargain.
There's not a pheasant-stocking gun club in the state with dues that low, commercial preserve hunting can cost close to $100 for three pheasants, clubs buy and stock birds for $10, more or less, more later in the season because the breeder has to spend more to feed birds longer, and semi-wild preserve memberships cost several hundred dollars a season.
So for the $40 required, plus a $28.50 hunting license, hunters can find plenty of sport with birds stocked three days a week at 25 Wildlife Management Areas (WMAs). The Division of Fish and Wildlife is stocking 60,000 pheasants this year, starting with the first loads of the "Rockport Rockets" from the Rockport Game Farm that were turned loose for Saturday's opening of the small game season.
The birds are a special blend of English ring-neck pheasants, Korean Green pheasants and black-necked pheasant, a blend designed to produce strong flyers as well as good looking birds. Pheasants were brought to New Jersey, in fact, to this country, by hunters.
Hunting for wild pheasants went downhill around the time leghold traps were banned and predators that feed on eggs, chicks and mature ground-nesting birds increased, but the tradition continues via birds raised under wire, pheasants like those grown during 14 Rockport hatches from spring through early summer. When birds get big enough, they live in 34 acres of spacious pens.
Hunters' license money was used to buy 492 acres for the Division at Rockport in 1925, only 13 years after the Division purchased 133 acres and opened its first state fish hatchery at Hackettstown in 1912, long before anti-hunters started complaining about our sports and wanted to control the Fish and Game Council.
There were 4,230 pheasants stocked at seven North Jersey WMAs for the first day, and more will be stocked on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until Dec. 29. Black River, Berkshire Valley, Whittingham, Pequest, Walpack, plus the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area get the birds. The areas can be crowded at the start of each day's hunting, but there's usually plenty of room later in the day.
• Speedwell Lake will be stocked with 200 chunky rainbow trout and Mount Hope Pond will get 160 on Nov. 21 as part of the Division's Winter Trout Stocking Program that will provide anglers with 5,030 trout averaging 14-15 inches on that day and on Nov. 19 and 20 at 23 lakes and ponds around the state. The fish will have to be hand-loaded onto trucks because they're too big for the fish pump usually used to load Pequest Hatchery trucks.
• Fishermen who use kayaks have a new online kayak fishing magazine to check out at www.kayakfishingmagazine.net. Kayaks are ideal for carrying to fishing locations like the Passaic River, where njtrout.com last week had a photo of a kayak angler with a nice northern pike on the Passaic River . Northerns have been hitting all the way down to Elmwood Park.
Election recap
How about that election? Two legislators targeted by the New Jersey Outdoor Alliance, a political action committee formed less than four months ago, lost in District 12, Monmouth and Mercer counties. Sen. Ellen Karcher and Assemblyman Michael Panter, who anti-hunters got to sponsor legislation to kill the Fish and Game Council and let the governor name one with seven of his political appointees, lost despite spending six times as much as their opponents.
The same bill the duo sponsored would have forced deletion of "food and recreation" from Division regulations and emphasized "non-lethal management" of fish and wildlife. Jennifer Beck and her two running-mates who will replace Karcher, her anti-hunting Assembly candidate and a third candidate, spoke in support of hunting and the Outdoor Alliance at a big rally held Oct. 29.
Despite their loss, there's still plenty of work ahead because the Assembly has other legislators who do what anti-hunters tell them. But now hunters have a PAC equipped to work to oust legislators who cater to the extremists.
In a rut
The rut's been on full blast, as even non-hunters might notice when they see the increase in roadkills as bucks chase does in heat. There was a 10-point piebald from Camden County and a lot of big bucks pictured on newjerseyhunter.com, the head of Ohio's I&E section got a 275-pound 18-pointer out there with a crossbow, a Minnesota woman shot an all-white six-pointer, a guy I know got a piebald doe in Somerset County, and a reader said he saw a huge all-white 10-pointer in Hunterdon.
Also in Minnesota, a conservation officer shot the antlers off a dead 10-pointer that died locked to a 14-pointer that was freed after the shots, and another big buck shot by a hunter in another state had a four-point antler stuck in its right eye.
Bad news bear
Our oddest story was the Sussex County bear that broke onto a van to get candy, knocked off the emergency brake and crashed the van 40 feet away. The bear not only "drove" carelessly, it also left the scene.
http://www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/SPORTS/711110348/1002
