Pheasant Surprise

Experiments in animal husbandry, and appreciative readers, bring joy to life in the country.

- Michele Hewitson

Blimey. It is a new year, and the promised petting zoo is still under construction. All I can say is that one has to be patient when one intends to construct a petting zoo worthy of accommodating the Greatest Sheep That Ever Lived (known to some as Xanthe, Greg’s lamb, but we will see about that). In the meantime, the latest money-making scheme here at Lush Places is to raise pheasants.

This would never have occurred to us, but we have been told it is perfectly possible. Even better, we would not actually be raising the pheasants. The genius of the scheme is that we can trick the evil chickens into raising the impostor chicks.

A nice man from the Wellington Regional Council, who is testing the aquifer that feeds our bore, has told us that this is what he does with his broody chickens: he orders pheasant eggs, puts them under broody chickens, the chicks hatch and voilà! Happy chickens and baby pheasants. I thought there might be a glitch, though: the rabbit-brain-eating cat.