Pheasant likes to run backward.

[lawman7]

Ok.. How common is this. I have never seen it before. I thought most birds could only walk forward... Thoghts please..

 

[Whittni]

If they like to go backward, I see no reason why that's odd but it might be uncommon. My chickens back up when I go in their pen, so I'd imagine pheasants can too. I think the walking backward thing might be confused with flying backwards, like hummingbirds can fly backward.

 

[lawman7]

Thanks for the reply. The only reason I asked was cause it would rather run backwards than forward. It is 2 weeks old so I am not sure what it is.

 

[Russianbeast101]

On June 29 I hatched three golden pheasants that all walked backwards one died a week ago and the other two died today and yesterday.

 

[plunk72]

My hen pheasants run backward a lot. I thought that was odd myself.

 

[chooks4life]

Inbreeding can do this. Doesn't matter if you didn't do the inbreeding, all that is necessary is for both parents to be carrying a recessive gene that matches up in some offspring.

As a kid I too was taught the line about birds being unable to walk backwards --- so much junk science is recirculated every year, even stuff that's been disproven for decades! Shameful.

This backwards walking thing is now a trait in some strains of quail etc because some people don't see anything wrong with it if it doesn't kill them outright or in an obvious manner. So they keep breeding them. I would avoid breeding from them personally, which is an issue with rare birds, not necessarily an easy fix problem there. It's a temporary spasm that occurs regularly over their lifetimes, it can be triggered by various things as far as I've heard. It seems to affect the neck in many cases too, they hunch it into their shoulders or it goes under their bodies. I think it may also be a symptom of some kind of poisoning in other cases.

Walking backwards as a symptom also occurs in various others species as a reaction to physical pain of a certain type/location, like walking in circles, or continually heading off to one side, etc. Generally it represents neurological damage, either inherited or acquired.

 

[lawman7]

Wow.... Thanks for the info Chooks4life. That explains a lot!! I will be sure to seperate this bird out and not let it breed. Looks like it will go in the smoker..

 

[chooks4life]

You're welcome, hope something helps. No guarantees as to what has caused the backwards-walking issue but if I had to bet on one, inbreeding is probably the most likely of all the things I mentioned. With the more rare breeds of pheasants plenty of folks would prefer to try to breed it out, but if it were a more common breed I'd just eat it, personally. Best wishes with that. I've never eaten pheasant, I wonder how smoked pheasant tastes... Must be nice!

 

[LyrebirdJacki]

Wow you have solved something that I have always pondered about with my quails and I kind of just stumbled into this post (doing pheasant research before I start my first pheasants).

I find that a few cotournix I got as eggs from a breeder all seem to do the "backwards walk" in spontaneous bouts. Sometimes they are normal, then it's almost like an itch they just back it up 10cm or so and carry on with whatever quailey things they were doing. The breeder claimed his stock was "top quality" (as I try to breed for healthy/quality birds to show) but all my own quails never do this. His birds may look good but I always thought they acted a lot different from the other quails that I have been breeding for years and never had that issue. It's a good thing I ring ID all my birds

I'll make sure to discontinue breeding with those birds, thank you.

Had no idea that pheasants did this, thought it was a quail thing hence why I was interested. I'll have to keep an eye out with future pheasants to see if the trait persists with them as well.

 

[chooks4life]

Good to hear you won't continue that line. I'm not a fan of the rationale that since it looks fine on the outside, aberrant behavior doesn't mean anything... Everything means something. Like those turkeys that drown in the rain. It doesn't excuse the fault, to me, to justify breeding bad stock by how meaty they get, that trait needs eradicating.