How To Make Food Plots for Upland Game Birds

There are lots of articles written about deer food plots but we sometimes forget about making sure upland birds have what they need to get through lean times and hide from predators.

In this article we will go over how to make food plots for upland game birds – pheasants, quail, doves and grouse.

Here is a list of the requirements for our main game birds:

• Tall overhead cover
• High stem density in the case of grouse habitat
• Fruiting shrubs
• Seed-producing grasses
• Bugging habitat for young birds

Here is a list of the steps required to make food plots for upland game birds:

1. Get rid of unwanted grass and broadleaf weeds
2. Prepare the site with farm equipment, fire or logging
3. Plant grasses and shrubs and trees if necessary

To make food plots for game birds you need tall overhead cover, seed-producing grasses and shrubs, bugging habitat for young birds and winter cover that will stand up to provide cover all winter.

Let us assume you have a fallow old field you want to use to provide for game birds.  Here are some steps to take:

Step 1

Assess what you have growing there.  Most old pastures have non-native thick grasses that were planted for livestock.  These grasses do not provide any habitat for wildlife and should be sprayed to get rid of it.  If the field is full of nasty broadleaf weeds like thistle, teasle, horsenettle you may want to spray the entire field with a non-selective herbicide and get rid of all of it.

Step 2

You may have to mow or disc your field to get the existing plants down and prep the site for planting.  If you do any tillage, you will have to wait for the seed bank to respond then spray it again to get on top of the weeds.

For really tough weed issues, you may want to use a pre-emergent herbicide and pre-plant incorporated herbicide applications.  There are several types available, you just need to read the labels and decide what is the best match for what you want to get rid of and what you want to grow.

You can use roundup ready corn or soybeans and use glyphosate products properly applied to get a stand of grain for over-wintering birds and get rid of weeds at the same time.

On the subject of discing, you may want to simply disc harrow a field to refresh new growth from the seedbank if you already have plants that help out game birds.  Some strips can be left for this treatment.

Often, a landowner can simply spray the old fescue grass that had been planted for cattle and disc a field.  Do some prescribed fire where practical and the seed bank may take care of the grass and forb cover without having to plant anything.

Step 3

Choose what to plant

Depending on how much space you have, its a good plan to put in some winter cover like switchgrass – as much of this as you have room for.  You can do field edges, strips laid out for hunting ease or patches with food plants inside a larger field of switchgrass.  When planting switchgrass, always have a sparse cover of it so that birds can move about inside of it easily.  A good forb component of your switchgrass planting is important for wildlife food and movement.

For pheasants, doves and turkeys, milo or sorghum is a good choice.  There are many varieties of sorghum.  For tall cover that pheasants and quail can move around in without getting seen by hawks, sorghum sudan grass can be a good choice.

Corn is a great choice for these same species.  If you have the room, plant corn and let it go fallow the next summer.  The standing stalks provide cover and the weeds that come up will provide foraging areas for broods.

Buckwheat can be planted in summer for a late summer seed supply for birds.  Winter wheat is a good choice for over-wintering birds.

A shrub component to your bird fields is very important also.  The old hedgerows back when they were left for windbreaks were loaded with pheasants when I was a kid.  Quail need fairly open mixed meadows interspersed with shrubs.  Any shrubs that can make berries and canopy cover are good choices.  Viburnums, dogwood, crabapple, chokeberry, service berry and elderberry are all great choices to plant.  Alder and hazelnut in wetter ground is a good idea.  They will need deer browse protection, though, until they are mature enough to withstand browse pressure.

Plant a variety of different plants and double cropping will provide different maturation dates.

Grouse Habitat

Grouse habitat is tough to produce.  Where providing for pheasants is pretty simple, the needs of ruffed grouse are more particular.  Not found in the fields, but in young forest habitat, grouse need heavy cover with open ground on the forest floor, soft mast, thick evergreen thermal and roosting cover.  In winter, they feed on buds of aspen and spruce along with late-holding soft mast.  They don’t feed high up in the trees very often and prefer to have young forest with fruit and buds available close to the ground.

They also need drumming logs located in very high stem density saplings where they will display to attract females.  On-going forest regeneration practices on your land is the best way to encourage high grouse numbers.  Continuous use of prescribed fire is a great way to increase stem density and soft mast.  Here in PA, partridge berry, blueberry and wintergreen thrive after fire.  Heavy disturbance such as cutting with a fecon head to set the forest age class back is a good practice as well.

The best thing to do for grouse is to regenerate new forest with regeneration-type harvesting.  Often, favored grouse species come back on their own, but it doesn’t hurt to plant some of the soft mast species mentioned above along with aspen.

Conclusion

Growing food plots to attract and hold game birds is a great way to enjoy wildlife abundance on your property.  To hear grouse drumming, pheasants crowing, bob-white quail whistling, turkeys gobbling is a great indicator that your land has tremendous abundance for wildlife of both game and non-game species.

Many of the plantings we do for deer will double as help for game birds as well.