The farmlands of north-central North Dakota near Minot are well known for their abundance of pheasants. The terrain is ideal upland bird habitat, with abundant wheat and soybean fields and plenty of coulees with cover that ringnecks relish.
Local hunter Eric Henke and six buddies were chasing birds on his farm there on Dec. 7. It was a frigid morning — “chilly even for here,” Henke says.
“There was 6 inches of snow on the ground, the temperature was 5 degrees and there was a 15 miles per hour wind,” he tells Outdoor Life. “It was so cold that we wanted to start our hunt at mid-day so pheasants would have time to warm up and move around, so our four dogs could scent and find them.”
They split into two groups and worked together near each other. They followed behind a pair of German shorthair pointers, a German wire-haired pointer, and a Labrador retriever. They got into plenty of birds and were rapidly closing in on their three-bird limits.
“My friend Miles Zietz walked out on a finger of cover and flushed a white pheasant that got up 150 yards ahead of him,” says Henke, a 37-year-old farmer. “We went that way where the bird flew and flushed it again far out of gun range.”
Henke and his friends knew about the rare rooster. He says they’d seen it over the past two years, usually in the summer, when its white feathers showed up starkly against the green grass. But it always seemed to disappear during the fall and winter.
“We surrounded the brush where the white bird had flown into and the dogs worked overtime trying to find it,” he says. “We knew there’d be other roosters that would flush out, but we waited to get a chance at the white bird.”
The dogs worked the area for about 15 minutes. Finally, one of them went on point, and the bright white rooster flushed just 10 yards from Henke. He dropped the bird at 30 yards with a load of #4’s from his 12-gauge, but then it hit the ground and took off running. It took a while for the dogs to find it in the snow, but one finally did and brought it right back to Henke.
The rooster is almost all white, with some bright-colored breast feathers that are typical of wild ringnecks. It’s not an albino, as it doesn’t have pink eyes. It’s more likely a leucistic or piebald bird — genetic mutations that affect coloration. These kinds of birds are sometimes bred in captivity, but Henke says there are no commercial pheasant operations anywhere near his Ward County farm.
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Henke will have the bird mounted by a taxidermist as a flying wall mount.
“It had a long 22.5-inch tail, and it’s really beautiful,” says Henke, who brought the bird to a taxidermist to be mounted. “No one I know has ever seen a bird like it. And I probably won’t ever see another one.”
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