By Meg Jones
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
OREGON, Wis. — They came as furry golf balls and left Friday as adult birds so pretty they glowed like chameleons when the sunlight hit them just right.
Last May, 3, 400 pheasant chicks were trucked to the Oregon Correctional Center south of Madison where they grew from warming houses to small cages to larger pens under the watchful eyes of hawks, owls, cats and the two inmates paid to care for them.
The polka-dotted and ring-necked pheasants were scooped up Friday and set free at sites across the state just in time for Saturday’s opening of pheasant hunting season.
While the birds were free to go, their minders — Tim Morrisey and Tim Kelly — could not leave.
They’re finishing their prison sentences at the minimum-security community facility.
In a joint program between the state Departments of Natural Resources and Corrections, pheasants hatched as chicks at the DNR game farm in Poynette are taken each spring to the minimum-security facilities at Oregon and Sanger B. Powers in Oneida, where inmates are paid to raise them as part of Wisconsin’s annual restocking efforts.
Officials say the program, which began in the 1980s, puts inmates to work and teaches them responsibility while lowering the costs of restocking. Efforts are under way to possibly expand the program to more Wisconsin minimum-security prisons.
Earlier this month on a bright sunny day, hundreds of pheasants hugged or scratched the ground in each of eight pens on 2.5 acres of the Oregon Correctional Center property. Kelly and Morrisey used scythes to cut the corn, but some pens still had standing cornstalks.
Some of the pheasants bunched together in groups while loners perched on beams or wandered by themselves. Several nibbled on ears of corn scattered on the ground.
For much of the summer, Morrisey and Kelly worked 12 to 14 hours every day. Morrisey earned 26 cents an hour while Kelly qualified for slightly higher hourly pay, 42 cents. They built brood pens, planted corn and constructed feed boxes. It was a never-ending job of checking for holes in fencing and the chicken wire overhead to keep predators out and the birds in.
Kelly and Morrisey said it wasn’t difficult to find pheasants that had made a run for freedom. Pheasants are not among the geniuses of the animal kingdom and often those that managed to flee could be seen near their escape hatch waiting to come back in and eat.
“It was a good summer. It went by fast,” said Kelly, a cabinetmaker from Madison.
“When we first started, we spent a lot of time fixing the netting,” said Morrisey, who worked as a finisher at a Menomonee Falls factory. “It’s a great job to have.” By the time DNR crews came to crate up the adult birds, about 400 had died or disappeared, leaving 3, 000 from the Oregon prison to be released for hunting season. Inmates at Sanger B. Powers also handled 3, 000 pheasants.
Some of the pheasants drowned in puddles during rainstorms, some were trampled by their pen mates, and others were found stuck at the top of the overhead netting with their heads missing, victims of turkey vultures, owls or hawks, Morrisey and Kelly said.
Working with thousands of pheasants each day, Kelly and Morrisey said they began to recognize the personalities of some of the birds. “It’s not like dogs you play with. We did name some,” Kelly said. “There was Quasimodo - he had a little hump. There was Jerry and Lewis. One was named Bob.”
Added Morrisey: “One was always on the wood beam every morning when we came out. He’s Charlie.”
The pheasant-rearing jobs are often sought after because the inmates enjoy working outdoors with little supervision and they like the responsibility, said Oregon Correctional Center Superintendent Kyle Davidson.
Each season it’s two different inmates because people typically don’t stay longer than a year at the minimum community facility.
All of the pheasant chicks, which Kelly likened to furry golf balls, are hatched from breeder flocks selected at the Poynette game farm. Pheasants in the wild nest in grasslands, their light brown or drab green eggs camouflaged from predators, and lay clutches of 10 to 14 eggs, said Bob Nack, game farm director. At the farm the eggs are collected, washed and inspected and incubated for 24 days. The 1-day-old chicks are sent to Oregon and Sanger B. Powers while thousands more are kept at the game farm.
This fall, the DNR will release 51, 000 adult pheasants at an annual cost of $360,000, with 60% of the funding coming from $10 pheasant stamps bought by hunters and the rest of the restocking program’s costs borne by hunting license sales. Last year 40, 000 pheasant stamps were sold in Wisconsin. The rest of the pheasant stamp money is spent on habitat projects because the traditional range of pheasants, which prefer wide-open grasslands, has rapidly dwindled over the decades.
Nack said raising pheasants at state prisons costs the DNR 50% to 60% of what it would cost at the game farm, which employs seven permanent employees and eight to 10 seasonal workers. In addition to the restocking program, pheasants raised at the game farm are provided for hunter education programs.
The birds carefully reared at the prisons and the Poynette game farm are released at 71 public hunting grounds in the state.
“What we don’t tell them is when,” Nack said. “We don’t want hunters to be out there when we’re releasing birds. We don’t want them to be following our trucks. We want this to be as close to a hunting experience as possible.”.
Copyright, 2010, Journal Sentinel, All Rights Reserved.