Bitting Pheasants and Going to Wood

This year's hatch is officially complete - don't ask me the final tally as it's a keeper's secret how many birds are hatched, but overall it was a good season and we had surplus to sell. A shoot can only make money in two ways: young birds sold to other shoots, or birds sold over guns (i.e. shoot days).

The value of a pheasant as food is minimal, and a partridge only slightly more than minimal: a couple of pounds ($3-4) a brace. Feathered game is sold as a brace, that is two birds tied together at the neck, traditionally one of each sex.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. At the moment, the oldest birds are just going out to wood. The younger birds are being bitted. Both have been our jobs this week.

Bitting is the practice of fitting small, clip-on rings into the bird's nasal passage. Pete's using a bit gun to insert the bit -

This is a bitted bird. The bit prevents the bird closing his mouth all the way -

She can still eat and drink without problem. But, young pheasants have some unpleasant behaviors including pulling each other's tail feathers out, causing their victims bleed to death. If they can't shut their mouths tight, they can't grab hold of the feather to pull it out. It's for their own, and each other's, protection.

We try and keep stocking rates low, to prevent stress which exacerbates the situation. Some sheds of birds don't pull feathers and we don't have to bit them. When the weather is as good as it's been this summer, we can get the birds out on fresh grass quickly, and this also cuts the rate of feather pulling. So far we've only bitted 3 sheds, and have 2 more that need doing tomorrow, which is less than a quarter of the sheds.

Bitting can be a loathsome task. It's hot and dusty, and the birds are skittish.

It takes 4 of us about an hour to complete a shed. We each sit in a corner, and then it's simply picking up each bird, fitting the bit, putting it down and picking up the next bird. Repeat ad nauseum.

The mask helps to prevent us inhaling the dust, but I can tell you from experience choose your lunch carefully. Cheese and onion pie burps in a mask are intolerable. Almost worse than the dried bird poop you will shortly be picking out of your eyebrows and hairline. The pheasant food is made with fish meal and it smells bad enough before it's been through the pheasant.

Sadly, I've had worse jobs.

When the birds are old enough, they "go to wood". That is, they are put into release pens which are large areas of wood that have a perimeter fence with ankle-high electric fencing to keep foxes out. There's no top on the pens so the birds can fly in and out as they please, and roost in the trees. They view where they roost as home. We feed them here, to encourage them to hang around and want to roost in the pens. This will be vital later, during shoot season.

To put a bird to wood, we catch them in their sheds, remove their bits (if bitted), crate them -

 

This is one technique for catching and holding young pheasants. You catch them by the legs - both legs - from behind. And you must hold them above the knee joint, by the meat on their thighs. Otherwise you could dislocate or break their leg. By holding 5 birds like this, it frees up my other hand to simply flick the bits out of their beaks.

Once we've filled the crates, they're loaded on the back of the trucks for the mile or so journey to a pen. These birds are going to Hankmoor pen. The truck is backed up to the pen gate -

The crates are unloaded and set in the wooded pen -

The doors are open and the pheasants come out and explore their surroundings at their leisure -

Then the crates are collected and stacked on the truck and the whole process starts all over again until, over a period of weeks, all the birds are put out to wood.

With birds in the woods, we have to keep on top of predator control. This year's fox cubs will be old enough to hunt for themselves now, and young pheasants are an easy meal. Buzzards and sparrowhawks (both protected) will have the odd poult, but foxes can annihilate a hundred or more in one evening.