Hatching phesant and quail eggs

cds12

New member
Anyone out there have any experience or luck hatching eggs? I am looking to try this year and since the breeding season is just around the corner I thought I would give a try. I want to use them to trian my GSPs. I also am looking to build a new kennel and housing for the birds if I have luck so any advise would be great. Thanks

PS Another of my bright Ideas. The wife is having regrets already......"I'm not feeding birds too!"
 
I've been hatching my own birds for dog training for years. It's really not that hard.

Just a word of advice though. Don't mix pheasants and bobwhites. Those bobs are mean little birds.

It's too indepth to tell you how to do it but you can find a wealth of info on the web. Just do a goodle search for "hatching game birds."

The hardest part is getting viable eggs. I've ordered them from all over the place and at times I"ve hatched out 75% all the way down to 10%. 10% is low and makes those eggs very expensive.

Randy
 
Just a idea but quail are hard to raise and pen raised phesants dont fly well, so. I use pidgeons they are easy to raise and they come back if you dont shoot them. Just a thought, it might save you time, money and a marrage!
 
Back in High School I sent away for a hatching "kit" that I saw in a hunting magazine.

The kit consisted of an incubator and a dozen bob white quail eggs.

The incubator was the size of an 8 quart kitchen pot with a clear plastic lid. All I had to do was plug it in and set the tiny eggs in place. The incubator did everything from there. Every few hours a metal rod would rotate that touched the eggs and made them roll over. Like I said all I had to do was plug it in.

After about a week or so all 12 hatched and lived (I guess I got lucky R Buker ?), cute little suckers.

Naturally my plan was to raise the quail so I could eat them, wrong answer. Call me a big softy but I fell in love with those stupid little birds.

While they were still in the “fluff” and not in there pin, they would follow me around the back yard like they would there parents. This really ticked my sister off because they wouldn’t have anything to do with her! Once there feathers started coming in I made a coop where they lived for about six months.

As they grew they started to act like quail do, they wanted nothing to do with me. All could fly, really fast too, when I managed to catch them all I took them to a state park that held quail and let them go.

Sorry I was reminiscing there…

Anyway, look in the back of hunting magazines like Field and Stream, you should see similar kits.

Steve
 
If you raise phesants, don't put any sharp corners in the pen. If the corners are rounded off, they cannot pin themselves in the corner, where the smaller ones sometimes die. On cold evenings especially they will crowd into the corner.

Also, if you leave lots of weeds and cover in the pen they will be more flighty, and won't pick at each other as much, resulting in nice long tails.

Sorry, no experience with eggs or quail.
 
At my place, I have had many chickens since as far back as I can remember. I group them into two divisions...Half of the chickens being good egglaying birds, and the others, bantams (show birds). Well I have also breeded these birds for years and found out that the bantams are great birds for setting on eggs to hatch. A few years ago, I bought a couple pheasant eggs off of an individual, and when a bantam hen began to set I replaced her eggs with the pheasant eggs. Three weeks later we had pheasants. We let the mother raise the young until they could survive on their own, then separated them from the mother, slowing turning the pheasants more and more wild. Mind you they were still part domestic, but they eventually became spastic but looked great. We ended up keep one hen and a rooster, and they ended up breeding and giving eggs. We ended up taking those eggs and having those hatched under another bantam hen. We did this many times and ended up with over 20 pheasants over a 2-3 year period. We could have easily hatched MANY more, but we just chose to limit how many due to the cost of raising them. Surprisingly this method turned out very well. This method can be hard work at times, but it definitely works and is fairly cheap. We ended up keeping most to eat /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif but the first rooster and hens that we kept we eventually let go in a nearby woodlot. Hope this helped.
 
Good old ringnecks and nothing but. It was great. Going to do it again this summer I think. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif .
 
You'd probably be better off and not spend any more money if you just bought day old chicks. My brother has raised them a few years and had pretty good luck with them. We used an empty stall in the horse barn. It's not exactly a flight pen but it worked.
 
Originally posted by hoosierdaddy:
[qb]You'd probably be better off and not spend any more money if you just bought day old chicks. My brother has raised them a few years and had pretty good luck with them. We used an empty stall in the horse barn. It's not exactly a flight pen but it worked.[/qb]
I don't think I will mind spending $2 a chick to get back into it. Much better than buying $15 for a full grown bird to train the dogs.
 


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