![]() Raising pheasants in Mississippi has its challenges. To thwart such domestic violence, Tribble piles branches as a hiding place, and clips the males’ wings so that the female can fly out of his reach. “He’d kill her sometimes, if he could,” Tribble says. I asked Tribble about the heaped piles of branches in each pen, and he told me that some males tend to attack their wives. The most unusual is Nepal’s national emblem, the Himalayan Morel, which looks like an oil slick has been poured over his back, boasting iridescent blues, greens, and purples.ĭespite their beauty, not all pheasants are a walk in the park. In stark contrast to the whites and blues of the ducks and quail, the male pheasants sport every color in the rainbow. Right now, Tribble has breeding pairs of Swinhoe’s pheasants, white-eared, blue-eared, Lady Amherst, Elliot, Ijina copper, Ghigi golden, Crimson-horned, Temminck’s Tragopan, and Himalayan Monal pheasants, as well as several mountain quail native to the Sierras, Chinese white Mandarin ducks, a pair of white peafowl, and the Brahma Bantam chickens. “We buy and sell to each other.” He then amends his statement, saying that through the donations of exotic pheasant breeders, rare and threatened breeds like Swinhoe’s pheasants have been reestablished in the wild. ![]() “Me and other people like me have started a false economy,” he says. Since breeds such as the rare Crimson-horned pheasant can sell upwards of $525 for a pair (with the buyer paying for the costly shipping), I asked an obvious question: who buys birds too fancy and too pretty to eat? Tribble takes care to emphasize the importance of the post office in his business as he says, “I couldn’t do this without the Post Office in Water Valley. In mid-September, he’ll begin selling and shipping the fledgling pheasants and continue until his stock runs out. Egg-laying will continue through the end of June, and he’ll have all the baby pheasants he can expect by the end of July. This year, he found his first pheasant egg on March 15. As Tribble says, “It’s the old-timey way, but it works better.” The hens incubate the eggs and then raise the baby pheasants, sheltering them under their wings in bad weather and teaching the adopted birds how to eat. Since that time, Tribble has returned to taking the eggs from the pheasants and slipping them under his Brahma Bantams after he removes the chicken eggs. Sometimes you have a good year and everything goes right, and sometimes – last year, I lost my first 40 eggs when we went out of town for a few days and the electricity went out.” To support the cost of expensive feed and the price of the birds themselves, Tribble breeds each pair – removing the eggs so that the female will lay more– and raises the baby pheasants until they’re old enough to sell. “They’ve got about a six-sound vocabulary, and they know who you are.” “Don’t ever think a bird doesn’t have a personality,” Tribble tells me. ![]() Then I heard about exotic breeds, which sell for hundreds.”ĭespite the fiscal advantages of raising pricey birds, Tribble views his pheasants as a hobby – and an intelligent one. I sold those for about five dollars a pair. “Eleven years ago, I got chickens, and then I happened upon people wanting ring-tailed pheasants, the regular kind. During his years of raising pheasants, Tribble has had at least half of these species in his backyard.Īs I trail Tribble between a series of pens and coops, he tells me how he went from being a retired telephone repair man to raising birds from countries neither of us have ever been to. There are 52 breeds of exotic pheasants in the world, mostly hailing from China and other Far-East countries. When I heard tales of a local man who ships exotic birds all over the country, I had to track him down.īehind his rural home in Yalobusha County and under the shade of several large oak trees, Tribble raises and breeds exotic pheasants – along with a few other unusual birds. Meet James Tribbile Yalobushian’s Work Helps Reestablish Rare Pheasants In The Wild
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