Cheer Pheasants

Cheer pheasants are not common in avicultural collections because they aren’t as flashy and brightly colored as many other pheasants are, but their feather patterns are actually quite beautiful despite being in understated colors! Cheer pheasants are found in the highlands and scrublands of the Himalayan region of India, Nepal, Kashmir, and Pakistan.

Our pair of Cheer pheasants are named HipHip and Hooray and are quite bonded. Cheer pheasant males are monogamous, and its quite apparent with this pair that they love each others company. We just acquired this pair in late 2020, so we are looking forward to seeing the males displays this coming breeding season.

Cheer pheasants are known to be diggers, so we built an aviary with this in mind. The entire bottom perimeter has a buried hardware cloth skirt both to control their digging from the inside as well as discourage predator digging from the outside. There is a lot of rock and sand in their pens so they always have something to dig and move around.

Cheers are on the IUCN red list of endangered species and are labeled as vulnerable due to habitat loss and sensitivity to human disturbance. Some captive breeding has been attempted in order to release more Cheers back into the wild but these programs have not been very successful. We are super excited to have these gorgeous birds in our collection and hope to hatch from them this spring! This breed of pheasant has surprised us and quickly become one of our favorites and we hope to have the ability to help get this beautiful breed into more avicultural collections in the future.