Written By Donna Engle
Each spring, the basement of Fred K. and Janice Teeter’s Uniontown home becomes a nursery for about 100 chirping fluff balls.
It is all because of the pheasant who came into their lives six years ago. He was a big, handsome bird (Phasianus Colchicus) with a sleek green head accentuated by a white ring collar, iridescent brown body feathers and a spectacular tail. The Teeters enjoyed watching him dine at their bird feeders and roost in a nearby yew. A month after his arrival, the bird was killed by a car as he tried to cross Uniontown Road.
The pheasant’s short life stirred Fred Teeter’s memory. Pheasants had always been around when he was a boy, growing up near New Windsor in the 1950s.
“It got me thinking,” he said. “I hadn’t seen one of those guys for a long time. I’m not religious, but I thought, if there’s a sign from God, I should do something about it,” he said.
Teeter’s sense about the disappearance of pheasants was accurate. Pheasant populations have dropped, in Carroll County and across the nation. The most serious threat to the birds is loss of habitat, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Housing developments occupy fields where pheasants used to find grain. Some farmers plow to the edges of fields, leaving no hedgerows to provide cover. Others leave some hedgerows, but the habitat becomes fragmented. Foxes and other predators cluster around the truncated hedgerows, and the birds can’t escape.
Other observers note that pheasants eat dead gypsy moths, ingesting the toxins from sprays that killed the insects. One theory is that soybeans, planted increasingly since the 1970s, are at one stage of their development, toxic to pheasants.
“They’re not like deer. Deer can survive in the middle of Rockville, but birds need nesting material and cover,” said Melody Smith of Taneytown. Smith is president and cofounder with her husband, Grant Smith Jr., of the Carroll County chapter of Pheasants Forever, the only Maryland chapter of a national organization dedicated to conserving pheasants, quail and other wildlife.
Smith and her husband plant grasses for pheasant cover on their 43-acre property through a United States Department of Agriculture program. When her three children were growing up, they raised pheasant chicks by collecting eggs from adult pheasants that the family kept in a fenced outdoor area, and putting them in an incubator.
“Three times a day, we turned those little eggs,” said Smith. “We put x’s and o’s on them. Sometimes we used a bantam hen as the chicks’ surrogate mother until they grew up and flew off.”
When the local chapter of Pheasants Forever first met in December, 1999, she recalled, “One farmer said we used to have pheasants, but we may never have them again. I said, ÔWe’ve got to do something to protect the wildlife we do have, even if we never have pheasants again.’”
Pheasants Forever, Teeter and several other people in Carroll County are raising pheasants to release into the wild, but with different approaches.
Pheasants Forever is oriented toward conservation and hunting. Members who raise pheasants or quail keep their contact with the birds minimal to assure that they retain their natural wariness, rather than thinking of humans as Mom and Dad. The birds enter the wild when they are six weeks old.
The chapter invested $1,800 in a surrogator, a self-contained unit for hatching and raising chicks. It is loaned to farmers who have habitat, food and shelter for pheasants or quail. The farmer’s role is limited to putting day-old chicks in the unit, checking the temperature, food and water, and opening the gate.
Teeter’s goal is to hear pheasants crow across local fields and to see them fly as he walks by, but he does not make pets of the birds. He handles the chicks only to move them to larger quarters, and checks their food and water supplies daily. He releases them from July through September.
When Teeter started, he did not know much about raising pheasants. Retired as president of the Hagerstown-Washington County Chamber of Commerce, he is co-owner of a wellness products marketing business. He enlisted his brother in-law, veterinarian Nicholas V. Herrick of Airpark Animal Hospital, to help. Herrick studied poultry pathology in graduate school and had raised pheasants and quail for release several years earlier. He became Teeter’s partner and medical consultant.
It has not been a demanding task. “Pheasants are pretty hardy little birds and easy to raise,” said Herrick. “We haven’t had any medical issues other than some defective chicks.”
It is not unusual for birds to be born with physical deformities, Herrick said. Two of the Teeters’ birds, Chester and Miss Hen, were born with disabilities that would doom them in the wild. They reside permanently in a separate cage. Both are hens — Chester was named before they discovered “he” was a female.
Teeter designed special cages and a neighbor built them, also renovating chicken coops on the property. Teeter installed an incubator in the basement, and in March, 2003, placed the first eggs inside.
The eggs spend 21 days in the incubator. Teeter’s first incubator proved too labor intensive, as the eggs had to be turned by hand, and produced a poor hatch. He replaced it with an $800, 150-egg incubator that rotates the eggs automatically.
After incubation, the eggs are placed in a hatching tray. In four or five days, chicks begin pecking out of their shells and the attendant on duty must move them to heat lamp boxes warmed to a constant 100 degrees. The chicks need food and water, but there is no chance the Teeters will forget to check on their new babies. Soft cheeping rises from the nursery and fills the house.
Last year, when Fred and Janice Teeter were away during hatching season, they drafted neighbor Marilyn Hanchett. When she protested that she didn’t know anything about hatching pheasants, Fred Teeter told her, “You’re a nurse, Marilyn. You’ll figure it out.”
She is a registered nurse and co-owner of a consulting business, and her training involved human babies, but she took on the job. Hatching started slowly, but the pace picked up. “First there were just a few. Then all of a sudden I was surrounded by hatching chicks,” she said.
Scooping up the chicks, Hanchett moved them from the hatching trays to the newborn cages, turned on the heat lamps and provided food and water. After the last chicks hatched, nursing duty became a matter of checking on the babies several times a day to be sure they had adequate food and water and were not overcrowded.
When the chicks are three weeks old, Teeter moves them to cages in the repaired chicken coops. Several weeks later, he releases the growing birds into the coops, where they can find hanging heads of cabbage to peck and bales of straw for perching and hiding.
“We found that setting up an obstacle course tended to keep these guys out of each other’s hair,” Teeter said. Herrick explained that less dominant birds lose their feathers if there is no place for them to hide from birds that win the dominance fights.
When the pheasants are three to four months old, Teeter sends them out into the wild. Sometimes he just opens the doors of the cages and releases the birds into the back yard, which backs up to a farm where they can find cover. Some come back to the cage at night for a time, and Teeter leaves food out for several days after releasing birds.
Teeter has wanted to restock the area where he grew up, so he arranged to release some birds on a farm near New Windsor. When he and Herrick opened the poultry carriers, “They flew out and wheeled,” Teeter said. “It was a beautiful sight on a beautiful day.”
The measure of success will be to see pheasants once again as a commonplace feature of life in Carroll County.
“If they survive the winter and are nesting, that will be our success,” Smith said. Pheasants Forever sent 36 pheasants and 100 quail into the wild last year and encouraged the owners of land where the chicks hatched to leave food out for them during the winter. The birds are likely to stay in the area where they grew up because it is imprinted on them, Smith said.
Teeter sometimes fears he may just be providing dinner for local foxes. But he has indicators of success: A neighbor reported a pheasant living by his swimming pool, and another person mentioned spotting the first pheasant he has seen in 25 years.
“We may be tilting at windmills,” said Teeter, “but if we stick at this, we might see more pheasants around.”
