Shooting Times & Country Magazine
The perfect pheasant pen
A release pen, the halfway house for your precious birds, needs to be constructed and maintained wisely, says Liam Bell
Rightly or wrongly, we sometimes assume that everyone who shoots pheasants knows what a release pen is, what it should look like and, crucially, for the ever-growing number of amateur keepers out there, how to get it ready for the birds and manage it once they are in.
I therefore make no apology for going through the basics.
A release pen is simply a halfway house for birds that have been artificially reared, which helps them acclimatise to living in the wild.
The birds are released into it at six to eight weeks old, and typically stay there for three to four weeks.
Large, open-topped pens are far better than small, pokey, netted ones. The argument for smaller pens is that the birds are more secure in a netted pen and less likely to escape, which to a certain extent is true.
What we are looking for in a release pen, however, is not somewhere to keep them but somewhere for them to live while they adapt to living outside. If the pen is netted, they won’t be able to get out and explore and it will take longer for them to adapt to life outside the pen when they are eventually released. Another disadvantage of netted pens is that there is always a risk of you keeping them in there for longer than is good for them, increasing the risks of disease and antisocial behaviour.
We fully expect a percentage of our birds to be outside the pen within a couple of weeks. Not living there permanently but flying out over the wire in the mornings, eating, drinking and exploring until early evening then pulling back into the pen to roost and re-entering it through the pop-holes.
Bigger is better
Another advantage of a large pen over a small one – and it’s something that will no doubt be highlighted on shoots that are releasing fewer birds this year due to worries about COVID-19 restrictions – is the rate at which they develop when stocking densities are reduced. Birds bulk up sooner, tails grow faster and the cover inside the pen, which is important to the birds for hiding from predators and sheltering from the worst of the weather, will last longer. More
only releasing a few hundred birds per pen, it probably isn’t worth the effort if it is only going to be used once or twice a year.
Electric fences are a must, as are fox-grids in the fence at the ends of the run-in funnels. The electric fence wire wants to be 9in off the floor and not touching anything that can short it out, and a double strand is better than a single but takes a little longer to put up.
Electric fences keep foxes, badgers, cats and dogs away from the pen
“Inside wants to be a mixture; the more diverse the habitat, the better the pen”
fence and should stop them trying to dig in because even with the bottom of the pen wire pegged down or buried, there is always a chance they will find a weakness and manage to get inside.
The inside of the pen wants to be a mixture of open spaces and rides for dust bathing and drying off after any rain; low, hard, scrubby cover for early roosting and shelter; and taller, more mature trees for roosting in when they start to feel their feet. The more diverse the habitat, the better.
They will need cleaned and disinfected drinkers and feeders and want to be put on dedicated pheasant grower ration to start with. They can be moved onto a poult or release pellet at 12 weeks old if you want to save a few quid, but they will be fine on the grower until you introduce them to wheat at 16-18 weeks.
They will also need an unlimited supply of cool, clean and fresh water. The cool, fresh, and clean being extremely important.
Drinker-wise you want to budget for one for every 25-30 birds and about the same for feeders.
The bramble and brash free perimeter of the pen needs walking round a minimum of twice a day to look for signs of forced entry and dead birds or kills against the wire, and to enable you to run any birds on the outside back into the pen.
Finally, you are only going to learn about releasing and bird behaviour, and pick up on things such a predation and disease, if you spend time with them. If you are rushing, and on a mission to get everything done quickly, you will miss things. Including the enjoyment you get from looking after your own birds.