Cock Pheasant

Hi Folks ,Had a wander around the woods today did get a couple of pics of the GSW at the feeding post I put up a week or so back,but on the way

home came across this old guy wandering down the side of the road(one of lucky ones "so far" to have been missed by the massed guns of local

farmers)couldnt help thinking how colourful he looked,so I had to hang out the car window and take a few pics,(hence the not so good quality)

 

 

 

 

  • I've always said that pheasants are built for eating not for flying!

    I ordinarily have between 20 and 60 in my garden daily!   Indeed so many that when I registered my count for the Big Garden Birdwatch, I got the red card alert for entering too many pheasants!

    I've a few that have figured if they crash into the hanging seed feeders that they get a free meal... only there's so many waiting below that by the time the kamikaze one recovers itself and lands there's no seed left for it!  

    I've also got a few that have learned to leap up and swing on the half coconuts that I fill with a fat, seed, insect mix.  

    There's a couple of hen pheasants seem a little brighter and they follow me round as I fill up the seed feeders and grab the overspill and they also watch to see the small birds landing on the feeder and wait below to catch it as it falls.

    I can kill quite a bit of time watching their clumsy and amusing antics:

    This is the cock bird about to mount a launch on the coconut!

    Excuse the quality... just a snap taken through the window this morning and we've got quite heavy sleet

    These were last week when we had a lot of snow:

  • Des here was one i took in Arundel last July. They are such beautifully coloured birds, it is ashame that they are shot for sport.

    This image was straight off the camera, no cropping or anything done

  • If they weren't shot for sport then for sure I'd not be over run with them.

  • Hi lostnspace ,thats a cracking shot,you must have a big lens or been very close to get the detail shown here,shows the colours up great,fantastic pic well done.

    Des

  • Blimey northenlass are you sure you arent breeding them,its a wonder the local keepers are not knocking on your door to arrange a shoot.

    Des

  • I live in an area that's prime country for hunting, shooting and fishing.  There's gazillions of game birds reared for shooting.

  • Sadly its big business shooting pheasant. Before we got our two dogs the missus and me used to stay in a cottage on an estate where they reared 15,000 Pheasants ready for the season. The groundsman asked me one time whether i was going to come back later in the year and do some shooting?? £700 per gun per day it cost, so i can see why people rear them for the big shoots each year.

    Des - He was only around 15 feet away. Photo taken on a Canon 5D MK III through a Canon 100-400mm lens at Wildfowl and wetlands trust in Arundel. A great day out :)

    Mark

  • Driven shoot up here is £1680 per gun per day.

  • Thats probably why a lot of the old gamekeepers still kill birds of prey,a case in Scunthorpe

    10mile down the road a couple of weeks ago where a keeper was fined £2000.00 for poisoning 2 buzzards.

    The stuff he used was banned 10 years ago but the magistrates commented that nearly every case that has been investigated and the poison identified has been the same stuff.

    Apparently 1 grain is enough to kill an adult human.

    He had enough to wipe out every bird of prey in the county of lincs and its a pretty big county.

  • Think people have more money than sense sometimes Northernlass, crazy really.

    Lincs is not the 1st place this has happened Des or the 1st time there has been fines given for such an act of poisoning BOP. The birds are only doing what comes naturally to them. If a gameskeeper is rearing birds for shooting for profit then £2000 is pocket change to him. Many do rear 10`s of thousands for shoots, of course some of them are going to be taken by other birds, run over by vehicles, caught by cats. Poisoning a couple of Buzzards for killing some of the birds is not going to stop them getting killed before a shoot in other ways.