Back when I was but a mere tadpole, I didn't have much choice in deciding precisely what my favorite outdoor avocation would be.

After all, my father was an impassioned bird hunter, and his penchant for ring-necked pheasants kind of rubbed off. At my early age, little did I understand that I was being not-so-subtly indoctrinated to the joys of wingshooting.

Nonetheless, if I were attending one of those benefit dinners for hunters and their conservation efforts, and my ticket was drawn for a free elk or mule deer hunt, I'd re-raffle the ticket and use the money to finance a pheasant hunt in some state like South Dakota.

Certainly that's not a knock on deer hunting. If I had a dime for every day I've spent in a deer blind or stand, I could purchase my own pheasant ranch in the Midwest. Nonetheless, my personal choice, like thousands of others, is wingshooting.

But does New Jersey offer action anything like that found in the Mid-west, or some of the other northern states to which grouse hunters gravitate? The answer is both yes and no.

No, you won't find pheasants flushing in the numbers you would in the Dakotas and states like Kansas or Missouri. But you can find some surprisingly good pheasant hunting in the Garden State nonetheless.

It's just a question of narrowing your choices to the hottest locations, and then choosing the most opportune dates or times during which the ever-present hordes of hunters have thinned somewhat. This is, after all, New Jersey. There will always be hunters afield, but there are times when crowding is less a problem. We'll address that later.

Before delving into the where and when, those new to Garden State upland gunning should understand that New Jersey has one of the finest pheasant-stocking programs in the Northeast, bar none. But that program didn't merely fall into place. It was -- and still is -- hunters who support the program.

Unlike some states like Pennsylvania, where birds are sometimes reared by private contractors located statewide, New Jersey's Division of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) has only one source of pheasants, and that is Rockport Game Farm, located a couple of left turns off Airport Road in Warren County.

Not long ago, just prior to the last hunting-license fee increase, New Jersey's pheasant-stocking program was in jeopardy. Quite simply, funding for Rockport and its various stages of labor-intensive initiatives just wasn't there.

In fact, there was talk of shelving the entire program. And one of the primary culprits in this controversy was, of course, the white-tailed deer.

Garden State hunters had done nearly a 180-degree about-face since the 1950s and through the late 1970s. That was when the ringneck reigned as king. Eventually, however, New Jersey hunters made a choice -- and overwhelmingly, chose the whitetail as No. 1 in their pursuits afield. With the "king" unceremoniously unseated, there's little doubt that deer are now New Jersey's top-rated game animals and the focus of most hunters.

But with ever-decreasing numbers of upland hunters, DFW officials had to make a rather unpleasant decision: Either scrap the pheasant rearing and stocking program, or raise the price of a pheasant stamp to cover the cost of rearing and stocking ringnecks in the Garden State.