The Effect of Excessive Hunting Pressure on an Area 
of Southern Miohigan Pheasant Range 
It is not unusual for the Game Division to receive post-hunting- 
season WDoots of cook pheasants being completely #shot out* of local 
areas. Although these birds do, at times and in some places, appear 
to be quite wary and difficult to see after the elose of the hunting, 
an investigation usually reveals that sufficient cocks have escaped 
the gun to insure an adequate number of breeders in the following 
spring. Sueh studies have been by no meants intensive, but we have 
found no area where cook birds were depleted to the extent that hens 
laid sterile eggs. 
Investigations on our own, or borrowed land have now reached the 
point where sove of the effects of heavy hunting san be evaluated; and 
I wish to call attention to data for the past two hunting seasons at 
the Rose Lake Wildlife Experiment Station. 
The state land and adjoining privately owned farms, have been 
managed at a hunting cooperative, with  05 acres Included in 1939 and 
1175 acres in 1940. Tickets were issued to hunters, who filled out a 
report giving the hours hunted, animals flushed, the kill and other 
Information. 
As the graph on the lantern slide shows there was 99 gun-hours 
of hunting for each 100 acres of the area in 1939. The kill was 10.8 
cook pheasants for the same unit area. A preohunting-season man-drive 
census flushed 9.8 cook birds per hundred acres on a centrally-located 
census unit of $00 ares. 
At the close of the hunting season in 1939 we felt that the Rose 
Lake land had been heavily hunted. There were suggestions by people 
in the vicinity that it had been hunted too heavily. However, field 
work during the winter and spring showed that there was a perfectly 
adequate number of cocks for breeding purposes.