Image: a pheasant rearing farm in Buckinghamshire. This post is by Guy Shrubsole; big thanks to Lewis Winks for GIS mapping skills.

New official data that I’ve obtained via a Freedom of Information request shows that just 131 shoots and game farms are responsible for rearing and releasing a staggering 6.2 million pheasants in England. At most 43 premises rear 4.7m pheasants; a maximum of 88 premises release 1.5m pheasants.

These findings should be of concern to conservationists and responsible shooting advocates alike: it is yet more evidence that the pheasant shooting industry is out of control. The industrial scale of pheasant rearing and releasing operations in England is now a world away from traditional shooting customs, where you ate what you shot. Its sheer vastness inevitably leads to grotesque waste, like the now numerous discoveries of mass pheasant graves found dumped on shooting estates around the country. It is high time that the UK Government – either this one, or more likely the next – brought in a country-wide system of licensing for pheasant shoots in England.

1. The national picture

In late 2023, I sent an FOI request to the government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), asking for it to release the latest data on the number of pheasants registered in its poultry register for England. I also asked for this to broken down into a number of categories, and by postcode district. This repeats an investigation I carried out in 2019.

APHA responded to me, stating that the latest data (January 2024) shows there to be 25,708,692 pheasants in their poultry register for England. (I have uploaded the full dataset as a Google Spreadsheet here.)

This sounds large. But we know from the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) that around 50 million pheasants are released annually into the British countryside. Whilst Scotland and Wales will account for some of this figure, most pheasant shoots are located in lowland areas, so it is reasonable to assume that the bulk takes place in lowland England. So why is the official tally so much lower?

There are two possible explanations. One is that the number of pheasants has gone down a lot: that’s possible, given that avian flu has placed some restrictions on shoots in the past couple of years. However, looking back at the data I obtained from APHA in 2019, we see that only 20m pheasants were registered on the poultry register back then too, prior to the recent bird flu outbreak. This leads us to the second and more likely explanation: that there is ongoing massive under-reporting of pheasant numbers by shooting estates. Indeed, the government’s green watchdog Natural England has complained about “the lack of compliance with the poultry register” by pheasant shoots.

Even so, this doesn’t render the APHA dataset useless. It also tells us other things. I asked for the data to be broken down into the three categories recorded when pheasants are registered: 1) breeding for shooting (ie. to produce new birds), 2) rearing for shooting (ie. the raising of chicks until they are ready to be released), or 3) releasing for shooting (ie. pheasants released into pens in woods and fields, ahead of the shooting season starting). The latest APHA stats for these are as follows:

Breeding for shooting – 1.2 million pheasants

Rearing for shooting – 14.7 million pheasants

Releasing for shooting – 9.8 million pheasants

So, this suggests that not much active pheasant breeding is done in England – that corresponds with what we know, that most pheasant eggs are imported from France. To dig more into the rearing and releasing figures, it’s helpful to turn to the stats broken down by postcode district.  

2. ‘Hotspots’ for pheasant rearing and releasing, and number of premises

APHA’s postcode district data gives us some indication of where there are ‘pheasant hotspots’ in England. Pheasant rearing and releasing, although widespread across lowland England, is not uniformly so; there are clear concentrations in certain areas. This increases the potential for negative ecological impacts, as repeated studies have shown that high pheasant densities can have detrimental effects on woodland ground flora, alter the structure of hedgerows, and cause significant changes in invertebrate populations.

APHA’s data also includes the number of ‘premises’ where pheasants are being kept – these will most likely be game farms in the case of pheasants kept for breeding and rearing, and shooting estates where pheasants are kept for releasing.

The January 2024 APHA figures are as follows:

a) Rearing:

• 459 postcode districts (out of 2,247 in England) in which 13.1m pheasants are reared (another 1.6m pheasants are reared by premises with no postcode recorded)
• The top 10 postcode districts for pheasant rearing account for 4.7m pheasants, a third of the total across England – and by a maximum of 43 premises (APHA’s data states ‘less than 5’ premises for many of these postcode districts, so I have assumed a maximum of 4 per postcode district where this is stated – the true figure may be even fewer premises)
• SY5, in Shropshire, accounts for the rearing of over a million pheasants by itself – and in ‘less than 5’ premises: suggesting some very large game farms in this part of the country. Postcode districts bordering the North York Moors and on the edge of Exmoor also feature.

Top 10 postcode districts for rearing pheasants:

Rank	Postcode	Number of Premises	Animal purpose	Usual Stock Numbers
1	SY5	LESS THAN 5 (ie. max of 4)	Rearing for shooting	1,060,100
2	CB8	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	810,000
3	HR1	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	790,000
4	YO18	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	500,000
5	LE16	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	311,100
6	EX36	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	305,000
7	OX5	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	283,500
8	PR3	7	Rearing for shooting	248,400
9	CV35	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	217,000
10	TA20	LESS THAN 5	Rearing for shooting	210,000
	Totals	Maximum 43		4,735,100

b) Releasing:

• 772 postcode districts (out of 2,247 in England) in which 9.4m pheasants are released (another 400,000 pheasants are released by premises with no postcode recorded).
• Top 10 postcode districts for pheasant releases account for 1.5m pheasants, a sixth of the total across England – and by a maximum of 88 premises.
• YO62 tops the list with 296k releases – lying within the North Yorks National Park and Howardian Hills National Landscape. Exmoor is another hotspot, with two postcode districts falling partially within Exmoor National Park responsible for the combined release of 270k pheasants. And we wonder why our National Parks are failing for nature…

Top 10 postcode districts for releasing pheasants:

Rank	Postcode district	Number of Premises	Animal Purpose	Usual Stock Numbers
1	YO62	19	Releasing for shooting	295,950
2	TN19	LESS THAN 5 (ie. max of 4)	Releasing for shooting	157,150
3	TA20	11	Releasing for shooting	153,400
4	NR34	6	Releasing for shooting	153,000
5	EX36	7	Releasing for shooting	140,300
6	EX32	7	Releasing for shooting	129,750
7	NR29	6	Releasing for shooting	129,100
8	WR10	6	Releasing for shooting	127,630
9	RG17	10	Releasing for shooting	126,750
10	CO6	12	Releasing for shooting	118,000
	Totals	Maximum 88		1,531,030

So, this means that a maximum of 131 premises (shooting estates and game farms) are responsible for rearing and releasing 6.2 million pheasants.

Of course, APHA’s data does not give exact locations for these estates and game farms, and pinpointing them is beyond the scope of this blog post.

3. Maps

My friend, the geographer Lewis Winks, kindly joined the APHA data with a GIS file of postcode districts in England to produce these chloropleth maps of a) pheasant rearing and b) pheasant releasing numbers by postcode district. I’ve displayed them below using a graduated colour scheme – the darker the red, the more pheasants – with ten classes, divided by natural breaks (the ‘Jenks method‘).

And here are two maps showing the top 10 postcode districts, for pheasant rearing and releasing:

Attribution data

Postcode district polygon dataset from here, used under Open Government Licence (OGL) v.3.0:

• Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2024
• Contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2024 
• Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2024