The Giant Pheasant

The giant pheasant of Huron, South Dakota is a ring necked rooster 28 feet tall and about 40 feet from beak to tail, weighing 22 tons, that stands on a platform on the south side of US Highway 14 on the east side of town. The Huron Jaycees commissioned it in 1959 and hired R. F. Jacobs, a sculptor from Gooding, Idaho, to build it over a steel frame welded by Huron Welding. The job took about four and a half months and 23,000 dollars, and it nearly failed at the end: the money ran short and the owner of the Plains Motel put up 5,000 dollars at the last minute to stop the disgruntled sculptor setting fire to the bird. Joe Foss, who had been governor until that January, christened it in October 1959 before a crowd of about 2,500, with Senator Francis Case and Congressman George McGovern in attendance. South Dakota had adopted the pheasant, a bird imported from China, as its state bird in 1943, and Huron has sold itself on the birds in the surrounding grain fields ever since. The statue has been repainted in 1974 and 1989, and in 2011 a local artist, Schaun Schnathorst, led a 20,000 dollar restoration. A liquor store was later built around its platform and has long since closed. The bird is privately owned: in 2003 Mike Jones bought the motel next door and the pheasant with it, and in 2023 he listed the statue and its small building for sale at 180,000 dollars, saying the city wanted nothing to do with it. No sale has been reported. An engineering assessment in 2019 found the fiberglass and the steel mesh inside too fragile for the pheasant to be moved.