Ohio club forced to cancel spring field trials as Avian influenza threatens pen-raised pheasants

The majority of the pheasants that hunters set their sights on during the fall in Ohio and other Midwestern states are pen-raised birds simply because the habitat no longer supports wild birds for the most part.
Even in pheasant-rich states on the order of Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota, the number of wild birds’ ebbs and flows with the vagaries of weather patterns, how much habitat is lost to agricultural production along with access to sportsmen. And in Ohio, the harlequin days of the 1950s and 1960s are a fast-fading memory for a shrinking population of bird hunters.