Pheasant strains: which bird is right for your shoot?

Ask 10 keepers which strain of pheasant flies best and holds tightest and you may get 10 different answers, each delivered with total conviction. The blackneck stays close to home. The Michigan flies like a dream, then drifts off down the nearest hedgerow. The Kansas shows well over flat ground. There is truth in a good deal of it, and yet the moment a bird is released, all bets are, to a degree, off.

Why pheasant strain reputations are so hard to prove

George Davis, chairman of the Game Farmers’ Association and a breeder himself, has spent a working life watching those reputations meet reality. “Some strains have picked up reputations, and there is truth in a good deal of it,” he says. “But once a bird is released it is free to behave exactly as it pleases.” It was not always so thinly evidenced: for decades the trade could lean on the old ICI game research station, which became the Game Conservancy and survives today as the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. Little dedicated study into how strains behave once released has been done since, George points out, and in its absence reputation hardens into lore, passed from peg to peg until no one can quite say where it began.

What every shoot wants from one bird, and why no strain delivers it

The question that has occupied him for a working lifetime is which is easier to alter, behaviour or genetic traits: the province of the keeper on one hand, the breeder on the other. The honest answer, he suspects, is that no single bird can satisfy everyone. He once asked Bill McFarlane, of McFarlanes in Wisconsin (one of the largest breeders in the US), whether he had a strain to suit the UK market. “I told him that our ideal pheasant needs to be large enough to please the keeper on delivery, small when it goes over the Guns, and large again for the game dealer to sell. It should also be tame enough to stick around and flighty enough to lift, productive and affordable with it.” Bill, happily, saw the paradox for what it was. “Everything has a consequence,” George says, “and the only real question is whether the new problem is easier to manage than the one you started with.”

Why table quality now belongs alongside holding and flying

If one thing has shifted since George first weighed up these questions, it is which end of that paradox now comes first. For Tim Weston of the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation, the table settles it. Keepers, he says, have long judged a strain on two reputations, holding and flying. “It should be three – holding, flying and table. If we can’t use them for meat, we lose the ability to say we’re harvesting something for the table. It becomes just a flying target.” That, he argues, is where strain selection should begin. “We’re producing a food product at the end of the shoot day, so that has to be your starting point. I wouldn’t have thought to say it a few years ago.”

What lifts this above sloganeering is that table quality and sporting quality need not pull against each other. “A small Bazanty is supposed to be a great flyer,” Tim says, “but it’s the breast that powers the wings. Less breast, less muscle. In theory a bigger-breasted bird should fly better and feed better.” The folklore, in other words, can have it backwards. On Exmoor they favour a big pheasant with the wing power to cross the valleys; in parts of East Anglia a smaller bird that springs up vertically is preferred, and it is those the game dealers grumble about. The dealer, Tim insists, is a customer shoots have been slow to treat as one. “If he wants a big, plump bird, that’s what you should set out to produce.” The near-collapse in demand for partridge over recent seasons has, he believes, concentrated minds. Choose the strain with the larder in view, not just the peg.

How rearing and release decide what a bird does in the air

Even the best-chosen bird, though, arrives with its potential already part-decided. By the time a poult reaches the release pen, much of what it will do in the air has been settled on the rearing field. “There are so many factors that impact a bird during rearing and then in early release that will ultimately affect the flight of the bird,” says Kenny Stokes-Nutting, a director of Trusted Game. It is why the scheme he helps run is tailored to each set-up rather than issued as a single rulebook, he explains, working through a rearing field and a shoot to identify what would help the birds “reach their full potential”. As the only UK-wide assurance scheme written and delivered by vets, he adds, it exists to promote best practice and self-regulation, and to drive continual improvement across the industry. Strain, in other words, sets a ceiling; husbandry decides how near a bird gets to it.

Why a single season is never a fair test of a strain

Dominic Boulton, PR and political adviser to the Game Farmers’ Association, sounds a related caution from the trade’s side of the fence. “There is no doubt that different strains of pheasant exhibit subtly different characteristics, but there are a whole host of other factors at play that affect how those characteristics manifest themselves on a given shoot,” he says. “Don’t be too quick to attribute performance to a specific strain. A single shoot day or even season might not be a fair reflection of a strain’s true colours – habitat is constantly changing and the weather is rarely the same two days running. Look for trends that stand the test of time rather than making snap judgements.” Carcass quality, he warns, can no longer be an afterthought: “If there is no demand for our shot game it becomes very difficult to defend shooting it in the first place. This will become even more important as we transition to non-lead shot over the next three years and game finds its way into new markets.”

Bird utopia: why the ground matters more than the genetics

For George, the breeder’s answer to all this is control. “I overwinter my stock, so my genetics are known to me, and I introduce new blood slowly and deliberately,” he says. “If you can monitor it, you can manage it” – though that, he adds, has a cost of its own. Beyond genetics, the biggest lever any shoot holds is the ground itself, what he calls bird utopia: a place that meets every need, from clean water and steady food to genuine peace and hard, unglamorous predator control. Get that right and a middling strain will hold; get it wrong and the finest genetics in the country will simply walk. The need most often overlooked, he says, is the humblest, grit. “It is astonishing how quickly it vanishes.” A bird with the urge will walk a very long way to find its stones, and risk its neck on the road to do it.

So where does that leave the shoot weighing up next season’s order? Somewhere between the breeder, the keeper and the game dealer, and a good deal closer to the ground, and the table, than the catalogue. George’s own conclusion, offered with the caveat that this is an article and not a book, has not changed in all his years of breeding. To find the truth, you have to stop thinking like a keeper, or a breeder, or a gun, and start thinking like a pheasant.