A pheasant is a long-tailed bird — and in America it is also a farm animal that USDA counts, like cattle and hens. Which states keep the most? Tap them most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Easy one! South Dakota — the pheasant is literally their state bird 🐾
2Answer
Among the states USDA lists, the order is…
Michigan! About 1 in every 7 farm-kept pheasants in the country is in Michigan, roughly 1.19× as many as Pennsylvania. Now go find South Dakota on the list. The ring-necked pheasant became South Dakota's state bird in 1943 — and on USDA's farm count the state sits at #10. A state symbol and a head-count are two different things. Stranger still, this bird is not American at all: it is native to central and eastern Asia, and people brought it here and released it outdoors.
📚 BackgroundThe ring-necked pheasant is not an American bird by birth: it is native to central and eastern Asia, and people carried it here and let it loose outdoors, again and again, starting in the 1800s. It took hold in the farm country of the Midwest and the Plains — so thoroughly that in 1943 South Dakota made this Asian bird its state bird. But a state symbol and a farm head-count are two different things. USDA counts pheasants the way it counts cattle and hens, and on that list the top state is Michigan, with South Dakota well down the page.(USDA NASS Quick Stats)
Easy one! South Dakota — the pheasant is literally their state bird 🐾
3Compare
Pheasants on farms (birds, 2022)
🇺🇸 United States (national)3,280,101 birds
Michigan#1486,820 birds
Most: Michigan (486,820 birds); fewest shown here: California (102,880 birds).
Note: pheasants counted on farms at the end of December 2022, from USDA's Census of Agriculture — the count of every farm in the country, taken once every five years. Wild pheasants out in the fields are not in this table. USDA NASS. USDA published a pheasant figure for 43 states; where too few farms keep them, the number is withheld to protect them. Each of the eleven states shown is bigger than every withheld state added together, so these eleven really are the national top eleven.
USDA NASS Quick Stats: PHEASANTS - INVENTORY, 2022 Census of Agriculture, by state (2026-08-12) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). The Census of Agriculture published a pheasant figure for 43 states; where too few farms keep them the value is withheld to protect them, so this is an honest partial ranking. Each of the eleven states shown is larger than every withheld state added together, so those eleven hold nationally — a check this site re-runs on every build.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick PHEASANTS / PHEASANTS - INVENTORY, Census year 2022, Total domain, and compare states.