adult phesents

marty555

hi guys. im just looking for some general advice and what uses think. I am involved in a game club and for the last number of years we have been buying young pheasants. but this year we are thinking about buying in adults birds that are reared in open ground and just caught up the for delivery. the talk is that these birds will be at least switched on the threat of vermin !! we do quite a bit of vermin control in the club but still by the start of the hunting season the numbers just don't seem to be on the ground.
so my question is. What do uses think of tis idea ? who would I be best contacting to find good birds and what price should we be expecting to buy the birds at ?
any help would be great !!!

mikeyboo

you can buy birds now for about 8euros or little bit more.in our gunclub we used to buy in march but found it a waste of time as day will only fight with each other and local birds because of the time of the yr it is. were thinking on goin to buy poults,or adults in sept/oct so there will be birds there for nov.

marty555

Well I think the exact term in birds we are looking for ! is game birds.
so when we get them they already know what vermin are !! if you just but adult birds straight out of game farm they have no idea about vermin. if you know what I mean.

RICKYD

We used to buy lotsa poults and rear them. Returns were never very high. Tried releasing adult pheasants in march the last few years and returns werent much better. We are going to buy adult birds in sept this year to see how that goes. Cant be much worse. All of the above would have had plenty of feed, medication and predator control carried out before during and after release

fiestaman

We done the same with birds early and changed 2 years ago. We put out 40 feed hoppers divided evenly among the area roughly 1 hopper per member and they look after it. Feed is bought about twice a year but lads may buy a bag or two themselves aswell and then we get fully reared birds from coolattin estate at €10 each around the last 2weeks of October and release them around all the hoppers. Found we are gettin a way better return this way. We also rear about 50 poults aswell from the NARGC just to avail of the offer for the vermin return

moreau118

We bought 100 reared birds and released in April last year we tagged them to see what the returns would be and only 2 were shot in the season so think its a bit of a waste of time

blackpearl

Problem with adult birds in sept or oct they have not been in a release pen in the area where they are spreading out from so after a week or 2 of been doged they leave the area. Where poults reared in a released pen will have a home base to keep them in the area after they have been hunted they will drift back into the area, people think that these adult birds are the easy way out yes if you have not got people in your club who are going to look after them, the reason some clubs do not get a good return on poults is bad vermin control.My club released poults for a couple of years everyone was mad keen after foxes day and night we had great returns but after a few years a good few members lost intrest in the vermin control around the pens the returns went down big time we tried adult birds in sept wee taught this was great no feeding or carrying water to pens first 3 weeks of shooting was great then their was not a pheasant in the place we held a meeting and after a lot of shouting and roaring we went back to the poults and put a big effort into vermin control arount the pens before and during when the poults where in the pens the returns were top class we still had good shooting in January so for the last 3 years we have stuck with the poults and the shooting is top class.Shooting and trapping foxes around the pens and you will have good returns if you don't well its not rocket sience we found these adult birds a big let down even with hoppers out they left the place in a couple of weeks.

allan450

as above is spot on.iv done it each way.The only thing that stood to me when i released the adult birds is it was surround by bog for miles on one side.so when they did **** off they had only one place to go.so for anyone reading go with the post above