May

The time for eggs and chicks

May is a very exciting month. All of our birds will have started laying if not before then during this month. We also have chicks already hatched and many due during the coming days and weeks. It doesn't matter how many chicks we have there is always great joy with every successful hatch.

A change is noticeable in the behaviour of the cocks. Since the hens started laying the cocks have lost much of their aggression towards them and the hens are able to wander around freely without the constant threat of attack.

Compatibility is often a problem with pheasants and it can be very disappointing when every egg collected is infertile. Therefore it helps to have a few pairs of each species to swap the birds around if this occurs. Of course this is not always the problem and inbreeding has caused a lot of infertility so we always keep our pairs of birds as unrelated as possible.

One problem which sometimes happens, but could be much easier to sort, is smashed eggs due to the hen laying when roosting at night. Of course you could take the perches away but the best thing is just to give the birds peace. It is usually only because the birds are disturbed that the hen will put off laying and then when she eventually lays it is late and she is already roosting hence the egg falls and breaks on impact with the ground.

Incubating your eggs can be tricky and we have found it is best to chart the weight loss of each egg. This is very time consuming with a lot of eggs but well worth the effort. There is a big difference between the amount of humidity needed for species from a high altitude such as the Monals and Tragopans which we incubate with a very low humidity setting and the more tropical species like the Firebacks which need a very high level of humidity.

Our chicks start their lives in our hatchers but because the humidity is set very high, to help them to hatch easily, we move them to a similar but drier environment. The heat in their new brooder is kept at 36 - 37°C. We use soft paper towels under the chicks, this is a good surface as the chicks do not slide on it. It is absorbent and they can find food on it easily as we usually have a small quantity of food scattered in this first brooder to encourage them to eat.  They will stay here for about 3 days after which they go into large cardboard boxes with brooder lamps above them.  These boxes, for the second stage of care, have many layers of newspaper with a generous layer of pine wood shavings on top as flooring.  A couple of weeks later when the chicks are moved again all this can be added to our compost. When the chicks leave their boxes they are given proper miniature indoor pens where they will stay until we feel they are hardy enough to go into our 12' X 12' outdoor aviaries. This is often around two months of age but as we judge each bird separately it can vary and our decision is also weather dependant. Once in the outdoor aviaries they stay here until they are sold usually from the age of three - seven months.

We rear our chicks on a pheasant chick crumb which for the first three days has cooled, boiled, water added to it. This must be changed at least twice a day or three times in hotter weather as it goes bad very quickly however it does make the crumb more palatable for the youngest chicks. After the first few days all the chicks manage fine on the dry crumb and the occasional small mealworm.

We are regularly asked if we sell eggs, but we feel that we would be failing in our job, to do the best we can for our birds, if we did not try to rear them ourselves and give them the best chance of survival that we can. Therefore we only sell our birds when they have grown into strong, healthy, poults and not before.