MAKING A NEW PHEASANT —  THE DARK LADY AMHERST

          The project to create a new pheasant was started thirty years ago.  In spite of my knowledge of the aviculture world's prejudice against hybrids, hybridizing was the only route I had to reach my goal.  I was going to transfer the Dark Throated Golden gene to the Lady Amherst and carry it on through enough generations that I would end up with a nearly pure Dark Lady Amherst.  My goal was to work long enough with these hybrids  to breed out all Golden genes.  This would take decades, perhaps the rest of my life.  I had always found the Lady Amherst more graceful and basically more attractive than the Golden.  I like the body shape and longer arched tail of the Lady Amherst.  The only thing wrong with the Lady Amherst was the lack of any color mutations.  The Golden had several.  This was the perfect place for my interference - a chance to make a new color Amherst.

I also have had a lifelong love affair with feathers.  They're mystical - pure magic.  They're colorful, light weight, durable, and replaceable.  I am an artist and have often used feathers in my work.  I started raising birds before becoming an artist, raising them for their beauty and I always saved the prettiest feathers.  Using feathers in my artwork meant that I could enjoy their beauty all the time and also be able to share them with others.  Thus the idea of creating totally new feathers to work with was very exciting.  To have never-before-seen feathers and to create a new pheasant was too great a temptation to resist.  I had to try.

Even as I began the first crossings of Dark Throated Golden and Lady Amherst pheasants,  I knew that the making of hybrids was, and is, taboo.  I have never quite understood this since plant hybrids have always been highly regarded.  Perhaps it has something to do with plants being stationary and animals mobile.  Whichever kingdom one deals with, to me the key is keeping good records and tagging all offspring.

The real problem comes down to the honesty of the breeder.  There is no problem making a hybrid.  The problem is making a hybrid and selling it as pure.  The breeder of any plant or animal needs to keep written records of all crosses and offspring clearly marked.  My birds have always been tagged and written records kept for each for more than thirty years.

I knew that the Ruffed Pheasants were very closely related.  Goldens (Chrysolophus pictus) and Lady Amhersts (Chrysolophus amherstiae) when bred create totally fertile offspring.  This fact made my project if not easy at least possible.  The first crosses produced as expected normal colored offspring all carrying the gene for the Dark Throated color and all being 50% Lady Amherst.  I always did at least two crosses with unrelated birds to keep the gene pool as diversified as possible for the next years crosses.  This allowed me to make the necessary crosses without breeding siblings, which would weaken my gene pool.  The next year these first offspring were bred to produce dark colored 50% Lady Amherst.  These dark hybrids were then bred the following year to full blooded Lady Amherst birds of different lineage.  These crosses produced all normal colored hybrids as expected.  They had 25% more Lady Amherst genes than the original crosses. 

Never did I sell or give away a hybrid.  Those hybrids that had served their purpose, were released on my farm to live out their lives in freedom.  Most became prey for foxes, owl, coyotes, raccoons or dogs.  I have never been successful at getting a wild population of Lady Amherst  pheasants established on my property.  The predators always win.

After almost a decade of breeding I became discouraged.  I had made progress but my birds sure didn't look like Amhersts.  But I was inspired about this time by a chance encounter with an unusual pheasant.  I was in Thailand for the World Pheasant Association Symposium in 1986.  We were visiting several private breeders' collections of pheasants.  While we were touring the collection of Suvit Chanvarasuth, he showed us his prize pheasants.  He called them Siberian Lady Amherst.  He said he paid more than ten thousand U.S. dollars for the pair, which he said he bought from a Chinese breeder.  I was astounded by a new color Lady Amherst.  However, the more I studied the colors on these new and beautiful birds, the more I felt that they were nothing more than Yellow Lady Amherst.

This Siberian Lady Amherst did not look like a hybrid.  It was a Lady Amherst but with no reds or oranges.  It had a very pale yellow crest.  It still had black and white hackle feathers with all the dark iridescent greens and blues on the wings and body.  This was just the inspiration I needed to continue on my journey to a Dark Lady Amherst.

I had also started the process of making a Yellow Lady Amherst, before my chance encounter in Thailand.  Thus seeing what I felt was the end product really inspired me to keep working on my own projects. 

Thus with renewed vigor, I continued the same process.  I repeated this process over and over for three decades.  The result is a dark bird which breeds true with all the characteristics, other than color, of a Lady Amherst.  Now after over thirty years, I have my beautiful new pheasants, the Dark Lady Amherst, the Yellow Amherst and the Salmon Amherst.

These birds still need help.  There has been some inbreeding even with the extra crosses I've tried to make over the years.  They should be crossed with new lines of wild caught Lady Amherst to keep them healthy.  They could easily get too inbred.

Clifton Nicholson, Jr. Roughwood Aviaries (812) 752-5227 www.clnjr.com