There's a pheasant shoot that takes place at the farm where I keep Jak. Ethics aside, it's made me wonder about natural selection.....

The pheasants that have more of a tendancy to run when they are scared, rather than fly, are less likely to be shot. So they will have more opportunities to breed in future years, thereby giving rise to more pheasants who are more likely to run when scared. Therefore selection will favour pheasants with smaller wings and longer legs.

Working against this will be the fact that birds more likely to run may be the ones who tend to get knocked down by cars.

So assuming that Tony doesn't ban shoots, how long will it be before pheasants are no longer able to fly??

Do I win "under-qualified sad cow of the year" award for this one??

Catherine x

But do the pheasants run because they have longer legs nad smaller wings or is it somehting they learnt when small? In which case would natural selection work that way?
Joining in with being sad!!
Hx

Now you've done it. A whole can of worms opened there!!

In theory, it wouldn't be that long on the evolutionary scale, especially when you consider that behaviourists were able to selectively breed 'tame' wolves in only a few generations.

However, on the other hand, shoots have gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years, right back to ye olde Kings and their Blunderbuss guns (or whatever they were called!!). Pheasants still fly today, even though we can assume that they differed in their reactions back then.

Some in fact do nothing at all - I know this because my dog brought a perfectly healthy cock pheasant out of the nearby crop field. He ate very well, once I'd butchered it a few days later, poor little pheasant! I do know that he had a very substantial breakfast the morning he became an ex-pheasant, so perhaps he was just too stuffed to move!

So, I conclude that pheasants are generally dippy and therefore unpredictable in their reaction to beaters. You can refer to my wisdom in future papers on the subject if you like