ShopWhat Chapters Do
Chapters are the gasoline fueling Pheasants Forever's habitat machine. Chapter events create Pheasants Forever members and dollars for projects - both critical to successfully fulfilling our mission. Most chapters meet monthly to discuss events and projects.
Events
Each Pheasants Forever chapter is required to hold at least one event a year at which annual Pheasants Forever membership dues are levied. For most chapters, a local fundraising banquet is their main event for the year. Banquets are typically attended by a few hundred local residents who buy a ticket for the event that includes their annual Pheasants Forever membership and the evening's meal. Raffles, live and silent auctions, games, wildlife art, shotguns, and hunting gear are some of the features to this exciting community event.
Other popular chapter events, include; wild game dinners, golf tournaments, dog training field days, youth outdoor activity days, mentor hunts, and shooting events.
Projects
Once chapters have raised funds, chapters have three main areas by which they can put their hard-earned dollars to work in achieving the organization's mission: habitat projects, conservation education, or legislative action.
Habitat Projects
Chapters work on private and public lands. Our philosophy, pheasants and other wildlife don't pay attention to ownership boundaries, so neither should our habitat efforts.
- Nesting Cover Projects: The single biggest limiting factor for pheasant populations across most of the country is a lack of good quality undisturbed cover for hen pheasants to use during the nesting season.
- Brood-rearing Habitat Projects: Another important piece of the habitat puzzle is brood cover for hen pheasants and their young chicks to use during the first few months of a brood's life. Quality brood-rearing habitat needs to be relatively open at the ground level, so chicks can move freely, but it also needs a higher canopy of cover to help conceal the chick's movement from predators.
- Winter Cover Habitat Projects: In the northern pheasant range, harsh winters can have an impact on pheasant survival if they lack adequate thermal cover in the form of plantings like plum thickets, cattail sloughs, or evergreen shelterbelts.
- Food Plots: While food is rarely a limiting factor to a pheasant's survival, quality food located next to sufficient winter cover can help hens cove through the winter in better shape for spring nesting season leading to better reproduction.
- Wetland Restorations: While our focus is on upland habitat, PF chapters have restored over tens of thousands of wetland acres over the years.
- Habitat Maintenance: The key to good habitat is continuously managing the land for wildlife. Mid-contract CRP management, prescribed burns, discing, interseeding, and other management practices are important ways chapters keep public and private acres highly productive as habitat.
- Land Acquisition: Chapters are also empowered to purchase land that is critical as habitat. Once acquired, chapters usually perform habitat improvements on the property, then turn the land over to a state natural resource agency or the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and it becomes a wildlife area open to public hunting and other outdoor recreational activities.
Conservation Education
Chapters also work hard to pass along our passion for the outdoors, our land ethic and our hunting heritage. In accomplishing these goals, chapters may host a wide array of events; including, youth mentor hunts, landowner conservation workshops, Farm Bill Forums, Leopold Education Project workshops, or youth conservation activity days to name a few.
Legislative Action
In addition to turning over habitat with a shovel, chapters work with our elected officials and natural resource agency professionals to affect conservation policy. These efforts can include chapter officer trips to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers, landowner conservation workshops, the funding of Farm Bill biologists, as well as participating in state wildlife planning committees.
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