We lost our rooster pheasant a while back. The winter starlings dive bombed the netting above their pen and made a big enough hole for him to fly out through and he was gone.

He hung around for a few days, long enough for us to see how much he was enjoying his freedom and to try and catch him, but no luck. Off he went, to find a flock of wild girls to hook up with (typical!).

Unlike our chickens and ducks, they are not easy to catch inside the pen, let alone outside of it!

So we needed a new pheasant boy for our pheasant girls as they are laying eggs again now and we’d like to hatch out a few pheasant babies again this year. In order to do that, we need a rooster (obviously)! Lucky for us, a few miles away lives the birdman of our dreams who has a little of everything we could ever want or need.

Well, almost. We ordered a new flock of Buff Orpingtons online this morning because he doesn’t carry them and we really like that particular breed of chicken. We’ve tried several different breeds over the years and keep coming back to them and the Red Stars.

We did need a new pheasant, though, so we met up with him this morning and picked out a lovely young pheasant roo who is going to be VERY happy at our place with three new girlfriends.

He also has turkeys, quail and lots of different chickens breeds (just not the Buff’s).

We may go back for some of those Sapphires though, since they are a lot like the Buff Orpingtons in temperament and egg productivity. We may even get some blue-egg laying ‘Easter eggers’ that we love so much once the Silver Wyandottes we have now are ready for the soup pot.

While we were there, we ended up buying some of the coturnix quail because they are easy to raise, are good breeders and are ready to butcher fast (about 9 weeks).

They are so tasty, too!

He also builds custom hutches to keep them in so we had him put us on the list for one of those. In the meantime, we’ll be putting together a nice little habitat to keep them in here at our homestead until their fancy new hutch is ready for them.

So that will keep us busy for the rest of the weekend, along with planting the onions and getting the other beds finished up and ready for planting the corn and pumpkins and tomatoes and carrots and….

I’m also going to be grinding up egg shells for the quail’s feed with my Vitamix blender. And then there’s the compost heap we’ve started working on, and mulching the flower beds and…

Ah, the life of a homesteader! I wouldn’t trade it for anything. 🙂