Content
Pheasants are very interesting and beautiful birds that are worth keeping even just for decorative purposes, although the main purpose of their breeding is to obtain meat and eggs. There are many varieties in this family and you can choose a bird to suit almost every taste. The most popular are the various subspecies of the Common Pheasant, which are also called Hunting Pheasants. But you can also select more exotic species belonging to other genera.
Although pheasant birds have now begun to displace quails from private farms, there are certain difficulties with them:
- requires a lot of storage space;
- “capriciousness” of eggs;
- pugnacity of birds;
- specific diet;
- strict seasonality of egg laying.
When breeding pheasant birds on the farm, you will definitely need an incubator. For complete beginners in poultry farming, it is better not to start their journey with breeding and keeping pheasants at home. You should first practice on less whimsical and familiar chickens.And at the same time, study in detail the techniques of breeding pheasants at home in a private backyard.
Characteristics
For beginning pheasant breeders planning to breed pheasants at home, it will be useful to first assess the size of their farmstead and the part of it that they can allocate for these exotic birds. These birds have a very pugnacious disposition. When pheasants are kept crowded in a private plot, fights with fatal results begin even among females.
It is also prohibited to mix different species of these birds or adult individuals with young animals. Unless the young were raised by the female herself. When mixing pheasants with chickens, even in a very spacious enclosure, fights begin between the roosters of these species. Fights go until the weaker opponent is killed.
Since it is often not possible to keep pheasants separately and in large areas, owners try to prevent fights by putting special “glasses” on the fighters. But birds quickly learn to get rid of the obstacle.
The second nuance that makes it difficult to breed pheasants in captivity is the thin shell of the eggs. The female can damage the eggs even just by touching it with her claw. The same point does not allow laying eggs under brood hens, although pheasant breeders make similar attempts. Chickens crush pheasant eggs. But a private owner cannot afford to maintain a flock of pheasants on an industrial scale and the same number of hens for pheasant eggs. This is why incubators are so common when breeding pheasants.
Contrary to advertising, the real experience of pheasant breeders shows that when keeping pheasants at home, females very rarely sit on eggs.
Conditions of detention
If the birds are kept solely for aesthetic pleasure, then they will be quite content with a small walk and room for the night. Such conditions for keeping pheasants at home are shown in the video below, where the owner does not have the opportunity to provide the birds with a full living space.
Pheasants will lay eggs even in such conditions, but you should not expect a large number of pheasant offspring.
Cage keeping of pheasants in sheds is not practiced anywhere. These birds need walking and the ability to move.
On pheasant farms, enclosures for young pheasants are determined at the rate of 1.5 square meters per individual. It can be compared with raising broilers, where more than 0.4 square meters are expected per bird. m.
To breed pheasants in home enclosures, each breeding bird must have at least 5 square meters of space. m. "living space". For beginners, the demanding nature of keeping pheasants at home can create serious difficulties. It will be quite difficult to build an aviary with your own hands that will satisfy these birds. Although pheasant birds are ground dwellers, they prefer to spend the night high in the trees, where they cannot be reached by predators. Without the ability to climb to a high perch, birds will experience constant stress. And since pheasants lay eggs very poorly under stress, it is unlikely that at home it will be possible to obtain the “claimed” 100 eggs per season from females. An aviary for pheasant birds should imitate natural conditions with trees and ground shelters.
In addition to a spacious and high aviary, pheasant birds require a specific diet high in protein.
Features of keeping in winter
Pheasants do not have any special requirements for keeping them in winter. Hunting subspecies in the wild winter quite independently. Therefore, birds do not need an insulated house; simply shelter from wind and snow is enough. The main requirement for keeping pheasants at home in winter is to provide the birds with energy-rich food. Often in this case corn grains are given.
If the grain is whole, then the enclosure must have plenty of fine gravel, which in the pheasant stomach works instead of millstones.
What to feed pheasants
The diet of pheasant birds in nature consists of plant foods and small invertebrates. Sometimes a bird can get hold of a lizard, a small non-poisonous snake or a mouse. When organizing feeding pheasants at home, these nuances should be taken into account. The diet of Hunting subspecies must contain a very large percentage of animal protein.
Most often, pheasant owners give them raw minced meat or fish. Another option for feeding pheasants to compensate for protein deficiency is not for the squeamish:
- a container is placed in the enclosure;
- put a piece of foam rubber or a rag into the container;
- pour meat or fish broth over everything;
- After 2-3 days, maggots appear in the container.
These maggots are bait for pheasants. In fact, fly larvae are almost one hundred percent protein and are very useful for birds. But the smell of rotten broth may not please your neighbors.
The remaining components of the diet that can be fed to pheasants are the same as for chickens:
- wheat;
- corn;
- legumes;
- fresh herbs;
- chopped vegetables.
In summer, pheasants in the enclosure can be given grass, fruits, and vegetables. You can also pour snails collected from the beds there.
The winter diet in nature consists of fallen cereal grains and dry berries. But at home, the question of what to feed pheasants in winter is easier to solve. A man buys grain for the winter. Some owners have the opinion that pheasants can survive the winter only by eating whole grains of corn, which will be crushed in their stomachs by gravel stones. But corn in Europe is no more than 500 years old, and pheasants have lived on the mainland for tens of thousands of years. Therefore, the basic principle is to increase the amount of grain feed.
To compensate for the lack of vitamins, birds can be given spruce paws. If you have dried berries: rowan, currant, raspberry, etc., you can also add them to your diet.
Therefore, we can say that fine gravel is an essential component of the diet at any time of the year. In addition to grains and greens, pheasants are given chalk and shells.
Feeders and drinkers
Like chickens, pheasants love to dig up the ground in search of food. In nature, this is justified, but when keeping pheasants at home, all the food from the feeder will be thrown into the litter and get lost in it. Provided that these are not whole grains. The feeders for these birds are the same as for chickens. There are two optimal options for pheasant feeders:
- trough feeder with partitions;
- bunker feeder.
Both varieties can be bought in the store, or you can make it yourself.
A homemade trough feeder is a piece of plastic drainage pipe with plugs at the ends. The pipe is cut in half lengthwise.Holes are drilled along the entire length on both sides of the gutter and pieces of wire are secured in them. The distance between the wires is chosen so that the birds can stick their heads to the food, but cannot scatter food to the sides.
The variety of bunker feeders is much greater. The store-bought one is similar to a vacuum drinker, but with a hole at the top. Homemade bunkers are often made in the form of a box with a feed tray at the bottom or from the same drain pipes.
Feed for young pheasants must be freely available to allow unhindered development. Especially if a batch of young pheasant birds is fattened for slaughter. But a working person does not have the opportunity to monitor feed consumption and ensure timely feeding of young pheasants. A bunker feeder designed for dry grain feed eliminates this issue.
Vacuum or nipple drinking bowls in bird enclosures are installed. Options for automatic trough drinkers with a float lock are undesirable, since the water in them is open and birds, digging in the litter, throw garbage into the drinker.
The advantage of a vacuum drinker is that it does not require connection to a water supply and can be placed anywhere. But the tray where water flows from the container also becomes contaminated with particles of bedding, food and droppings. The water container must be washed systematically.
The nipple drinker always provides the birds with fresh, clean water. But in this case, a connection to a water supply is required. If nipple drinkers are located on one pipe in a row, drip eliminators can be added to them, which will not allow water to wet the litter.
A homemade nipple drinker in the form of a bucket with holes drilled in the bottom has the same drawback as a vacuum one: pathogenic organisms multiply in the container. Drop eliminators cannot be attached to it, and drops from the nipples will wet the litter.
Below is a video on how to breed pheasants at home by building the right enclosures for them so that the birds do not die due to stress and fights.
Selection of pairs for breeding and breeding
Pheasant families are formed from at least 3 females. The normal number of females per rooster is 4-5 heads. A separate enclosure is allocated for each pheasant family. Otherwise, bloody fights between birds are inevitable. When keeping Hunting Pheasants at home, you have to take into account that usually the females are ready to lay eggs earlier than the rooster is ready to fertilize them. If pheasants receive compound feed for laying hens, they will begin laying eggs very early. The norm for the start of egg laying is the end of April - May. But at home, pheasant breeding can begin even in March. Reproduction in this case will be conditional. In March, males are not ready to fertilize eggs. Therefore, the first pheasant eggs can be collected for food.
When purchasing the initial stock from one farm, the pheasants will most likely be related. In this case, the offspring will be very weak, the percentage of pheasant hatching in the incubator is low and many chicks will die in the first days.
There are three ways to raise pheasants at home:
- the pheasant sits on the eggs herself;
- eggs are placed under the hen;
- incubating pheasant eggs at home using a household incubator.
According to reviews from experienced pheasant breeders, the first method is more likely from the realm of fantasy.Female pheasants very rarely sit on eggs at home. If this happens, the owner is very lucky with the birds.
The second method of raising pheasants is more realistic, but chickens often crush pheasant eggs. For this method of breeding pheasant birds, it is better to use a bantam.
But the method of breeding pheasants using an incubator needs to be considered in more detail.
Pheasant incubation
When selecting pheasant eggs for incubation before placing them in the apparatus, they are examined with an ovoscope. The shell of pheasant eggs is very fragile and there may be cracks in it that are invisible to the eye. The remaining procedures are similar to the selection of a hatching chicken egg.
Due to the small number of pheasant breeders and the too short period of breeding and keeping pheasants by private individuals on their plots, the incubation regime for pheasant eggs is still being tested experimentally and the data varies greatly. What is certain is that the incubation period for pheasants depends on their species. Moreover, in all incubation tables, the incubation mode for pheasant eggs is indicated only for the Asian (Hunting) species.
The incubation period of the Hunting Pheasant is 24-25 days. The silver lofura will hatch in 30-32 days. Therefore, when incubating pheasants, the temperature chart is a poor guide. It can only give approximate data on the incubation regime for pheasants.
Below are several tables with such data on Hunting Pheasants.
| Days | T, °C | Humidity, % | Number of turns per day | Ventilation |
| 1—7 | 37,8 | 60 | 4 | 0 |
| 8—14 | 60 | 5 | 0 | |
| 15—21 | 65 | 6 | 10 min. once every 12 hours | |
| 22—25 | 37,6 | 80 | 0 | 0 |
Days | T, °C | Humidity, % |
1—4 | 38 | Up to 80 |
5—8 | 37,7 | |
9—14 | 37,5 | |
15—18 | 37,3 | |
19—24 | 36,8 |
| Days | T, °C | Humidity, % |
| 1—5 | 37,9 | Up to 80 |
| 6—13 | 37,6 | |
| 14—19 | 37,4 | |
| 20—24 | 37,2 |
| Days | T, °C | Humidity, % | Number of turns per day | Ventilation |
| 1—7 | 37,8 | 60—65 | 4 | No |
| 8—14 | 4—6 | No | ||
| 15—21 | 10-15 min. 1-2 times a day | |||
| 22—25 | 37,5 | 75—80 | 0 | No |
It was a theory. Life is harsher.
Practical incubation of pheasants
Hatching pheasants at home is very different from industrial incubation. A working person does not have the opportunity to turn eggs manually, but automatic household incubators turn eggs once every 2 hours and this parameter cannot be changed.
The humidity in a household incubator depends on the amount of water in the machine. Before hatching pheasants at home, you can put a pan of hot water in a large homemade incubator to increase humidity, but then the temperature will rise, which before hatching the pheasants should be lower than at the beginning of incubating the pheasants in the incubator.
In a small household incubator, the owner can only influence the temperature, lowering it depending on how many days the incubation of pheasant eggs lasts. But such incubator models have one drawback: the temperature data on the incubator display may not coincide with the actual temperature inside the machine.
To establish the real picture, you need to measure the temperature at the corners of the incubator and in the middle. If everything is fine, you can try to get pheasants. How to hatch pheasants in an incubator in real life:
- pour water;
- lay selected pheasant eggs;
- close the lid and turn on the incubator;
- if the machine does not automatically turn the eggs, turn the pheasant eggs manually several times a day;
- after 4-5 days, illuminate the pheasant eggs with an ovoscope and remove the unfertilized ones (they are still suitable for eating);
- Reduce temperature as incubation progresses;
- 2 days before the expected hatching of the pheasants, transfer the pheasant eggs from an automatic incubator to a manual one, since egg turning cannot be turned off;
- wait until the pheasants hatch and transfer them to the brooder.
Next comes the second stage of pheasant rearing: feeding the young.
Diet of chicks
The temperature in the brooder is maintained at the same temperature as for chicks. But feeding the first-born pheasants will be different, since small pheasants need a large amount of protein food. As a dry grain feed, it is better for them to be given starter feed for broiler chickens, if there is no specialized feed for pheasants.
Finely chopped boiled eggs must be present in the diet. A week after hatching, the pheasant chicks can begin to slowly introduce fresh herbs.
Pheasant diseases: treatment and care
When pheasants are kept crowded, as always happens in business breeding conditions, these birds get sick in the same way as chickens. Diseases in pheasants are the same as in other chickens. But the situation is aggravated by the fact that birds are expensive, and the treatment for most bird diseases involves cutting off the head with an ax. When trying to “save” the pheasant population from infectious diseases using “folk remedies,” an inexperienced poultry farmer can destroy the entire flock. Diseases for which sick birds are slaughtered immediately include:
- Newcastle;
- flu;
- smallpox;
- Marek's disease;
- leukemia;
- infectious bursitis;
- reduced egg production syndrome;
- adenoviral infection;
- infectious encephalomyelitis;
- pullorosis;
- respiratory mycoplasmosis.
With all these diseases, chicken pheasants are slaughtered in the same way as any other poultry.
Other pheasant diseases are also “chicken” diseases and their treatment is carried out in the same way. Such diseases include:
- colibacillosis;
- coccidiosis;
- salmonellosis;
- helminthiasis.
Since it is impossible to keep pheasants at home on a private farm separately from other birds, the risk of disease in these birds is very high. Young pheasants are especially susceptible to infections. External parasites and worms are eliminated using appropriate medications.
Pheasant breeding as a business
Breeding pheasants at home as a business is often not a very good idea, although those who have already fallen for this bait are trying to prove the opposite. Why the idea is bad:
- prolonged sexual maturation of birds;
- large area required for one bird;
- frequent fights even between females;
- thin egg shells, due to which a significant part of the potentially hatching egg is lost;
- large losses in the event of a disease outbreak;
- low demand for products.
The most early ripening Asian species, which is called Hunting. These birds mature by one year. As a result, eggs can be obtained from them already in the first year, although they reach peak oviposition only in the second year. Other types of pheasants mature by 2 years. That is, the chickens will have to be fed for 2 years before you get a return from them. In this case, birds most often need to be replaced after the first year of laying. That is, all eggs received will be used for self-repair of the herd. Only the culling will remain for sale, which also still needs to be grown.
For meat
This type of pheasant breeding is usually done on a farm, where it is possible to keep large broodstock plus young pheasants for slaughter on an industrial scale. In this case, the question arises of where to sell the carcasses. Theoretically, restaurants can buy them, but these establishments do not accept meat from individuals, and even without accompanying documents.
The accompanying documents mean that to breed pheasants for meat, it is not enough to build an enclosure and purchase the initial stock. It is necessary to register a full-fledged enterprise in compliance with all veterinary standards. Thus, such a business will be profitable only at a large poultry farm. That is, we need an agricultural complex and serious financial investments. Since the demand for the meat of these birds is actually not great in Russia, breeding pheasants as a business is unprofitable for large entrepreneurs, and for small ones it will never even pay off.
Hunting
Attempts to breed pheasants for hunting by private individuals have already taken place and, as practice has shown, this can be profitable only when birds are bred to provide related services at a tourist center. Even attempts to sell raised pheasants to hunting farms turned out to be unprofitable.
If a hunting enterprise organizes shooting, then it itself breeds the animals and birds it needs, and also feeds wild ones for the convenience of hunters. There is no need for hunting farms to purchase pheasants from private owners. Visitors are always welcome to hunt other game.
In addition to adversity, only the Asian species can be used as a hunting pheasant. The rest are decorative and camp sites for hunting will not purchase them.
To zoos and to the tribe
Trying to find a marketing niche in this direction may be more successful. But in this case, a significant number of chickens cannot be sold, since zoos do not need much, and another farmer, having bought a breeding bird, will breed his own flock.
Perhaps someone will be lucky and there will be a steady demand for various types of pheasants in their region.But you will have to decide whether pheasant breeding as a business is profitable or not in each specific case individually, having carefully examined the potential market. With a high degree of probability, raising pheasants at home will be a hobby with a pleasant bonus in the form of some reimbursement of expenses from the sale of birds and their eggs.
Conclusion
In the case of pheasants in a personal backyard, the main difficulty is not that it is not known for sure how to raise pheasants at home, but that they have a very long reproductive period. As productive birds, pheasants are not economically profitable, and there are not as many lovers of ornamental birds as there could be.
