For us people of the plains, especially outdoor enthusiasts, the ringneck pheasant is a problem child - the difficult bird that, despite its demerits, we love all the more.
Favorite of upland game hunters up and down the plains, the ringneck tries hard to be a bad bird. Unlike quail, or even early-season grouse, ringnecks refuse to hold for a dog. They run, they are sneaky, and if left any feasible escape route, they find it.
The bad behavior of ringnecks is complicated by our circumstances in North Dakota. Especially in recent years, early in the open season for pheasants we have had standing row crops remaining in the field, offering legal and physical refuge for rascally birds. Once cold weather sets in, they flock up and get wild as the dickens, flushing in flocks out of range. Sometimes we get a nice fluffy snow that turns the advantage in favor of hunters, but how often do we get nice fluffy snow in North Dakota?
It almost seems like the ringneck pheasant is adapted for the frustration of hunters and bird dogs. It also is well adapted for a prairie landscape transformed by field agriculture. Tracts of grass and sweet clover and any old weed you have on the farm are good nesting habitat and shelter for ringnecks, but the birds thrive in the presence of grain crops, especially energy-rich feed grains.
Our agricultural transformation of the Great Plains landscape destroyed great tracts of habitat for the native prairie grouse, but opened up the land for pheasants - which were deliberately introduced. The famous first successful introduction of ringnecks to South Dakota took place in Spink County in 1908.
So this is the upland gamebird we have, but if the ringneck is so bad, why do we love it so? The first answer is that a rooster pheasant, I’m speaking the obvious here, is simply gorgeous. The iridescent panoply of its plumage is worthy of a runway.
That plumage is fortunate, too, because it makes obvious which birds are roosters and which are hens. Thus hunters can be allowed to take roosters but prohibited to take hens, thereby preserving the reproductive population. Sweet.
Still another reason we love ringnecks is that they are a great bird for the table, although often misunderstood. The deal is, the muscular, white meat of the breast is utterly distinct from the fibrous, darker meat in the rest of the bird. For consistent culinary success, you have to exploit the difference and use the parts in complementary fashion.
This means some kind of fricassee. You filet off the breast meat as the feature item, throw the rest of the bony carcass into a soup pot, and boil it. The broth, with residual scraps of meat from the carcass, is a double resource. The broth can be put into a fricassee of the breast meat, but also can stand alone to make pheasant and dumplings, wild rice soup, or whatever else you fancy.
Now back to the main event - brown the breast meat, after which you can go any number of directions. Established fricassee favorites in our house incorporate, on the one hand, cubes of buttercup squash and chunks of onion (shallots are nice, so are leeks), with generous administration of red currant syrup; or on the other hand, good field mushrooms and onion, plus a fair bit of white wine is involved. Fricassee #3, pheasant paprikash, I’m having some trouble with, but eventually I’ll figure out how to keep the sour cream from curdling.
There is one final virtue of these fricassees: you end up with a pot that needs licking out by a retrieving dog. A working dog is worthy of her hire.
~Tom Isern
