Pheasants

I've had a few people asking me about our pheasants lately so I thought that I'd head out and grab a few shots yesterday morning and do a post. This is one of our Impeyan pheasants which originally comes from the Himelayan moutians. We actually have 2 breeding pairs of these birds which are just stunning.

This is the female Impeyan and though she isn't as stunning as the male, she's actually quite spectacular in relation to other female Impeyans.

This guy (same bird as the above) is actually the son of our Grand Champion. In the pheasant world there are actually shows and your birds compete with others. They are penned up and then a judge goes around and judges each bird on the pheasant standards. Which basically means that the closer they are to the wild original birds the better. So good bloodlines are important. When birds get bred to substandard birds they produce incorrect colorings, body sizes and sometimes genetic failings.

This guy's dad has won Grand Champion which means he was the best bird of the entire show.

Beautiful isn't he?

He totally didn't mind me coming into the pen and taking pictures.

This one is called a Yellow Golden Pheasant and belongs to the Ruffed family of pheasants. He's actually a mutation of the orignal Red Golden Pheasants which we have but I didn't get photos of.

Here he is displaying to his mate. He was hissing at me so all these pictures are through the wire of the pens. All males do this in some form or another, humans just drive big trucks without mufflers ;)

Here he is with all of his beautiful tail.

This is one of our Chuker partridges. We actually have a trio (2 hens and 1 male) and between them last year we had over 2 dozen chicks.

Here is one of our pairs of Impeyans. Ron likes to make sure that their pens are a pretty close representation of the wild so that it makes them more comfortable. Despite the fact that all of our birds were born in captivity you just can't tame pheasants really. I mean sometimes you can get them to eat out of our hands (peanuts being a favorite) they will never truly be tame which is totally cool.

A lot of these birds don't have much natural habitat to go back to anyways. Most has been destroyed by humans through wars, farming and just natural expansion on our part. There are actually type of pheasants that are extinct in the wild and only exist in zoos now. Pretty sad.

This is the second set of pens that Ron has built here. He worked on these for the past 2 years and did an awesome job. He actually did this all himself, from landscaping the ground to make it more level, adding wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of sand and then smoothing it, placing rocks and stumps in natural configurations, then building the framework and placing the netting on the tops and sides. He's pretty awesome I think ;)

This is a trio of Jumbo Ringneck pheasants that we picked up last year at an auction. People might be more familiar with this breed of bird just because some have been know to be let out into the wild. If I'm not mistaken I think that there is a program out by Brooks that raises a whole lot of ringnecks and releases them into the wild. Don't quote me on that.

I think that they are pretty spectacular in their own right though.

If there are any questions please ask away and I'll find out the answer from Ron ;)