Silver Pheasant

This morning there was a work party to build pens for young pheasant that will hatch.

The first eggs, hundreds of, went into the incubator yesterday. They will be kept, rotating to mimic a mother hen and to move the eggs airsac, in the incubator at 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit for 21 days. On the 21st day the incubators will stop rotating, the eggs will lay still. The actual hatching will begin on day 23 however, the chicks could hatch as late as day 28.

Each species of bird has a well studied incubation period but, to complicate matters, each species has to have the correct humidity.

In nature, a female bird may take many days to lay her clutch. Eventually she develops a fever and becomes too ill to move from her eggs other than, periodically, to drink or have an enormous poo. The incubation period starts on the day her fever rises to the correct temperature to enable her eggs to develop. When the chicks are developed enough they 'talk' to mum, as though they were nursing her back to health. When the chicks hatch she is in top form, ready to protect them and teach them all she knows.

Most chickens eggs hatch on day 21, geese 33 - 35 days, quail 16-18 days. Your garden Robin will incubate it's eggs for 12 - 14 days and the blackbird 13 -14.

The saying, 'don't count your chicken before they hatch', is as true as a saying can get. A violent thunder storm or a sudden drop in atmospheric temperature can kill the embryo's long before they develop.

This is a Silver pheasant cock bird. It's a rare breed and not raised for the shoot. It's a stunning bird and is as it should be, totally wild, running with females in an appropriately enormous pen.

As I was loading this photo, I caught a vision from the window. Wrong lens...could have been a blip!