Pheasant.com Blog

French Red-legged partridges have been a popular choice for game hunters in the UK for many years. We have sold them for approximately 14 years at MacFarlane Pheasants. Hunting clubs across the United States appreciate having these interesting and high-flying partridges available for release because they add a real challenge to the hunt because of their flight and speed. We have been hatching the Red-legged partridge eggs, secured from France, since around 2009. To bring the eggs into the United States, we must apply for an import permit with the federal government three weeks before shipment. Upon approval, the eggs go to Chicago, where the U.S. Fish & Wildlife examines the eggs for clearance into the United States. We sell the French Red-legged partridges only as mature birds because of the work it takes to get the eggs here. We raise about 40,000 Red legs each year, and they are shipped to customers between August and the end of December. Red-legged partridges don’t do well in extreme cold and snow. We have customers who hold them indoors through the cold months and release them for spring hunts. The partridges we raise are known for their wild and flighty characteristics. They are rotund birds with light brown backs, grey breasts, and buff bellies. Their faces are white with a black patch of color at the throat. They have streaked flanks and red legs and make excellent early-season birds. To get more information about the French Red-Leg, you can contact Sarah at [email protected]. Read More »

We announced in an earlier post that we sold the 175 acres that currently contain about 20% of our flight pens. We also have barns, offices, and a maintenance shop on this site that will be at a new location by December 31, 2023. We are happy to announce that the work is finished on the new pens. We recently completed the pen project and placed our first Huns in the new pens. We built 76 individual pens that are 80 by 150 feet each. By the middle of July 2023 we will have the rest of our new pens filled with MacFarlane’s fabulous pheasants! The success of this project required some hard work by some great people! Read More »

We started raising Red-Legged Partridges in 2009. Our owner Bill MacFarlane had a customer request for these partridges and that started the ball rolling. Since the Red-Legged Partridge has been raised at game farms in France and Italy for centuries, we began exploring how to import eggs. We started importing eggs from France and became the only commercial producer of Red-Legged Partridges in the United States. Read More »

The plan for shipping our mature pheasants from MacFarlane Pheasants begins with our customers confirming their yearly bird numbers in the spring! Our mature sales' staff begins working diligently to give our customers an idea of the delivery schedule that matches the time they want to have their birds delivered. As the shipping date nears, the delivery is confirmed. If there is more than one customer in the same area, and there is room on our truck, we may make more than one delivery to an area of the country. Once we have scheduled an entire truck for delivery, we begin processing the crate numbers needed for the shipment. We provide the crate numbers to the “catch crews.” The crate numbers describe what types of crates are needed for each kind of bird and how many birds will be in each crate. Read More »

Lodewyk Davis (Wikus) has worked at MacFarlane Pheasants for five years. He has been the proud manager of the Milton Farm in Milton, WI, for three years, and we can thank him for sharing Milton Farm facts with us this week. We have two farms located in Milton, one we just call “The Milton Farm” and the other is a little further down the road and we call that “Doug’s farm” (it’s the surname of the owner we rent from). We have four barns, two pens on the Milton home farm, and another four at Doug’s farm. Read More »