A place can pick a symbol that did not come from there. The ring-necked pheasant is the proof — it crossed an ocean, and then it got a job.
The ring-necked pheasant — the long-tailed bird with the white collar — is not a native American bird. It comes from central and eastern Asia, and it was carried here and released outdoors on purpose, for hunting.
Basis: U.S. National Park Service species page: “Ring-necked pheasants are native to central and eastern Asia” and were “introduced across the United States for hunting purposes.”
In South Dakota the first release was in 1908, in Spink County. A century later the state held a “Pheasantennial” to mark 100 years since that release took hold.
Basis: South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks, “Time Flies: South Dakota Pheasant History”: “1908 First release of pheasants in Spink County”; “2008 South Dakota's Pheasantennial marked the 100th Anniversary of the successful introduction of the pheasant into South Dakota.”
Thirty-five years after that first release — in 1943 — the pheasant became South Dakota's official state bird. An immigrant bird, on the state's own list of symbols, inside a single lifetime.
Basis: South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks, “Time Flies: South Dakota Pheasant History”: “1943 The pheasant became the official state bird of South Dakota.”
Why did this particular bird settle in when so many introduced species fizzle out? The explanation usually offered is that the grain fields and weedy edges of the Plains happen to look a lot like the open farmland the pheasant already lived in on the other side of the world — plus people kept releasing more birds for decades. It is a reasonable story, but nobody ran the experiment, so treat it as a hypothesis.
Being a state's symbol and being counted on its farms are two separate things. USDA's farm head-count is a snapshot: the birds on farms on one day at the end of one December — wild birds out in the fields are not in it at all, and the state that tops that list is not the state that made the bird its symbol.
Basis: The USDA NASS series behind the pheasant quiz is an end-of-December inventory of pheasants on farm operations, taken for the Census of Agriculture; wild populations are outside its scope.
※ A hypothesis is an idea that isn't proven yet.
📊 Sources for the rankings mentioned in this note (links to the original data and retrieval dates) are on each quiz page below.