NIGHTLIGHTING: Its Use in Capturing Pheasants, Prairie Chickens, Bobwhites, and Cottontails
NIGHTLIGHTING: Its Use in Capturing Pheasants, Prairie Chickens, Bobwhites, and Cottontails – THE IDEA OF USING BRIGHT LIGHTS at night to blind animals temporarily so that they may be captured is certainly not new.
Prehistoric man probably used the light from burning torches in capturing wild animals.
Nightlighting in modern game management was first demonstrated by workers in South Dakota in the 1920’s. Oscar Johnson (Leopold 1931:118) reported that about 22,000 pheasants, Phasianus colchicus, were captured in South Dakota during the winters of 1926— 1927 and 1929-1930 by “shining”’ roosting birds with automobile headlights.
However, night lighting did not become a commonly used technique in wildlife biology until research studies, which proliferated rapidly after the mid-1940’s, necessitated the capture of large numbers of wild birds and mammals.
Night lighting has been used most numerous published accounts, including reports from Idaho (Anonymous 1952), South Dakota (Smith 1954), Nebraska (Anonymous 195),, California (Hart et al. 1956:137), Illinois (Labisky 1959), North Dakota (Oldenburg 1961), Indiana (Ginn 1964), and Towa (Lyon 1965:51)