An Introduction to Automatic Feeders
Some of the first products ever sold by Solway Feeders were Automatic Feeders, which we tried and tested almost twenty years ago.
Our automatic feeders were originally designed to give keepers a great deal more control over their birds, allowing them to harness the pheasant’s itchy feet for the good of the shoot.
Since the beginning of driven shooting, gamekeepers have been forced to come up with ways of controlling their birds, maintaining the tricky balance involved in keeping pheasants on their property, but not feeding them so much that they become lazy.
It is far better to train your birds to move back and forth from their cover to their rearing pens independently, so that when you come to drive them on a shoot day, they know where to go and they are fit enough to present a testing target for the guns.
This is where automatic feeders come in. After looking after his poults through the summer, the keeper will want to limit his contact with his birds as the shooting season approaches, since he doesn’t want them to be too tame when the beaters arrive.
Having given his birds an introduction to an automatic feeder when they are still being fed by hand, they will begin to associate the horn with feeding time.
Feeding the birds out from their rearing wood to the drives by hand can gradually be phased out as the autumn approaches, until there comes a time when they are called out of the wood in the morning by the sound of an automatic feeder's electric horn, then called back into the rearing wood in the evening by a second automatic feeder.
You will have a good idea of whether or not your birds are receiving the correct amount of food by watching their behaviour. If they hang around the roosting pens in the morning, despite the sound of the horn, the automatic feeder in the rearing wood is being too generous. The same is true of the feeder in the drive if the birds are reluctant to return to the roost wood in the evening.
With a little care and attention, a good keeper will soon have all of his birds moving back and forth between their drives and rearing woods when the shoot day arrives.
Not only will he have birds which are reliable and well trained, but they will also be wild and wary of human presence, quickly becoming used to seeing humans only when the feeder drums need to be filled.
The concept of an automatic feeder goes far over and above bringing the simple advantage of being time saving. With careful thought and planning, a system of automatic feeders can give birds an artificial structure which will benefit them and you.
If you are already using traditional feeders, it does not take much to adapt a feed hopper into an automatic unit. With the addition of an Accu Feed Unit, any container can be made to work as an automatic feeder.
