Today's episode of Ask A Farm(ish) Girl revolves around pheasants-more specifically, the answer to "why in the world" we would ever want to raise them. Note: We no longer raise pheasants at our farm, but we did for several years.
We never had luck with pheasants raising their own chicks even in a large area. We had one pheasant hatch chicks in all the time we had them, and she killed almost all of her chicks. That's why we always incubated. :)
Fun! Love your expressions, by the way. I hope you take some video when you release some... or when you're able to sneak up on a few of them. I'd love to see them up close and personal. :)
Like you I am a homesteader and raise Rouens ducks, Bobwhite and Coturnix quuail and now pheasants. Bobwhite quail are the high bar. Hardest of all the wild birds to raise!
We did eat the pheasant eggs when we had a lot of eggs, I would say they are about half the size of a chicken egg -- depending on the breed of the chicken. ;)
Very interesting! I know nothing about pheasants. But I was wondering about turning them loose for hunters. Is the a profitable type of thing or a hobby type if thing?
For us it was more of a hobby. We no longer raise them, we switched to ducks a couple years ago. We found out that you need to have a game license to overwinter the pheasants or hatch their eggs. And while that's not a huge thing to deal with, we decided it was time to switch to ducks. :)
Besides harvesting the pheasants for meat, I hope you are selling the feathers or hides with feathers to fly tying materials dealers. They are valuable for fly tying, especially the tail feathers.
after three years we discovered that in our state you need a game farm license to overwinter or incubate your own pheasants. Not an expensive license all, but you have to document a lot of stuff and it also invites people on to your farm to see how you're running everything. Didn't want to deal with that, so released everything we had and switched to Pekin and Muscovy ducks. 🙂
@@KC08RAS it was crazy because we researched a LOT before we got them and we never saw that rule in all of our research. I have no idea how we missed it.
