Pheasantville

The Pixley Gas sign is as dark as the sky when men sipping coffee muster for a predawn reveille in front of the Scout Shack. The reason for the bugle call in this San Joaquin Valley outpost arrives by truck -- orange crates jammed with 648 pheasants, oblivious to their starring role in the 35th annual Pixley Lions Club Pheasant Hunt, held a week ago.

Sleepy hunters circle the crates and then pile into their pickups and minivans to trail the big birds into the farmland. Tony Herrera, his dad Manuel, his uncle Tony and his uncle’s black Lab, Hunter, putt in a snake of cars that pauses at alfalfa, cotton and grape fields. Cage doors slide open, and the pheasants -- black dots against a slate blue sky -- beat their wings like hummingbirds and squeak their way to the cover of brush. Grown men revert to awestruck boys.

“Oh, look, they’re just beautiful birds! See them fly? Just lookie!” cries the elder Tony Herrera, a Santa Barbara lumber salesman. The men choose an alfalfa patch to stalk later and hustle back to Pixley for 90 antsy minutes until California’s pheasant season -- through Dec. 26 -- opens.

The Herreras are among 479 pilgrims who have converged on Pixley, a speck 50 miles north of Bakersfield, for first crack at pheasants. It’s the biggest thing going in this town all year, and like other dot-on-the-map communities around the state that have annual fests -- garlic in Gilroy, artichokes in Castroville -- the event has become an economic bridge between small-town California and its big-city visitors.

Pixley isn’t really crazy about pheasants; it’s hunters and their wallets that make the city jump. The women’s club hawks chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies; the Lions Club sells orange mesh ball caps and baggy T-shirts; and every school and social group in town is cooking up some nonfat-free delight. Pixley volunteer firefighters raffle rifles, including the straight-out-of-”A Christmas Story” Red Ryder BB gun.

Few townies partake in the hunt. The guys slinging shotguns are Southern Californians. “Some of them save all year to come to Pixley for vacation,” says Joey Quillin, a farm manager hanging at the Scout Shack. “I don’t get it. We’re just a ... hole in the wall. I guess here hunting is second nature. There, it’s this hobby.”

A woman chimes in: “My dog is always burying pheasants in the backyard.”

Open spaces

Best known for its cameo role in “Green Acres” and “Petticoat Junction,” Pixley continues to be the kind of place Eb and Arnold the pig would feel at home. The gray water tower hovers over town; dairy cows moo, and no traffic lights blink. The farmland stretches so vast and flat that the horizon seems to curve. Wild spaces are right outside town -- the Pixley National Wildlife Refuge harbors the San Joaquin kit fox and Tipton kangaroo rat.

The pheasant tradition in Pixley was launched by Wesley Smith, a real estate agent who borrowed the idea from a pheasant hunt in Five Points, Calif. The first year, the Lions Club sold five permits for $5 each and let men roam on Smith’s cotton and pepper fields. The second year, the club sold 15 permits and the year after, decided advertising might be a good idea. Within a decade, Smith says, word-of-mouth carried nearly 1,000 hunters to Pixley, so many that the club gradually hiked its permit price, to $125 this season, and capped permits at 500.

Southland sportsmen, used to trailing game at private clubs, warm to the downshifting in Pixley, population 2,600. “It’s homey, not so city-fast, where everybody’s out to get a car length ahead of you,” says Christopher Bombrys, a science and math teacher from Lancaster.

The main attraction is a visitor as well -- the emerald-headed birds with the curved beaks hail from Asia. They migrated to Oregon’s Willamette Valley from Shanghai in 1881, caged in the wicker baskets of a diplomat and his wife. Californians soon carted pheasants over state lines, and in 1912 Chinese laborers had the birds shipped from their native land to the Imperial Valley to ease their homesickness.

By 1933 the bird had captured the imagination of hunters, and the inaugural state-run pheasant hunt was staged. Today, pheasants are one of the most popular game birds, their flat habitat easier to traverse than that of other birds. About 576,000 were bagged last year.

On the hunt

Feathered in navy, burgundy, gold and crimson hues, the caged birds gave at least one Pixley guest pause the night before the hunt. Carol Valente, a receptionist from Simi Valley, could only be apologetic as she admired the pheasants.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

But the next morning finds Valente trekking fields soggy from a morning shower. A line of hunters in camouflage pants and knee-high rubber boots marches behind sniffing German shepherds. Maps guide the troops, but to avoid safety problems when too many triggers crowd the best spots, organizers no longer detail how many pheasants are set loose in each field.

Within 15 minutes Valente spots a bird and whispers its location to her friend Peter Lopez, who grips the gun. Crack. She scampers to the downed bird. “Um, Peter, where do you get it at?” Grasping the pheasant’s neck, its body dropping like a water balloon, Valente slips it into a satchel. “I made my peace with the birds last night,” she explains.

Elsewhere on the hunt, the three Herreras are creeping in unison through several football fields worth of alfalfa before Hunter gets a scent. The pup attacks the brush and clamps her mouth on a close-to-dead pheasant.

The younger Tony, who lives in Carpinteria, takes a break to rest a twisted knee, while Dad, uncle and their 12-gauge Berettas keep wading through the dry brush. Only Tony’s lighter breaks the silence.

“This is some sort of Pheasant Town, USA,” he says. “You don’t have city noise. You don’t see skyscrapers. You don’t feel all squeezed.” Within the hour, Tony rejoins the guys, and Hunter rousts another plump bird. The elder Tony downs it in a shower of feathers that, from afar, resembles parade confetti.

After the morning hunt, many of the hunters head to a drowned patch of cow pasture southwest of town called Risi’s Pond, where a dirt road hugs bass- and catfish-loaded water and locals snap holiday pictures. Jessie Phillips, her dad, husband and four kids are at work on the next phase of the operation: pheasant prep.

Feathers, tail and innards are dispatched in 90 seconds, while the kids hover with plastic baggies. “When it’s crazy, people will yell, ‘I need guts for fishing,’ and I’m yelling, ‘Here you go, here’s your guts!’ ” says Phillips, a psychiatric technician in a gunked hoodie and jeans she’ll trash at day’s end.

There will be plenty of other menu options before the pheasants are freed from their coolers and broiled at home. Some people head over to the eighth-graders’ barbecue, while pancakes are by the wheelbarrow at the 4-H breakfast, under the poster for the yearbook sale. The Lions Club event raises about $20,000 (Pixley’s median annual income is $23,000).

“You can’t raise money like this at a spaghetti dinner,” says Smith, a man who seems to have truly discovered green acres.

Times staff writer Ashley Powers can be reached at ashley.powers@latimes.com.