YORK - A York High School teacher has made the most of his time away from school since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Josh Miller is entering his 20th year of teaching at York High School. He's also working on his masters degree at the University of Nebraska-Kearney with an emphasis on biology.

This summer the Omaha-native has been using his extra time away from the classroom to learn how to raise pheasants as part of a project that will provide a unique learning opportunity for his biology students this upcoming school year.

"This idea of getting pheasants in my classroom, and working with our animal science lab and Jason Hirschfeld, has kind of come to a head here with the COVID-19 situation where I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to do in the future and create somethings for students that they wouldn't necessarily have to do in the classroom."

Miller says he's putting his knowledge to practice after working at Double Barrel Game Farm & Hatchery near McCool for the past couple of months. The southeast Nebraska operation will produce 700,000 pheasants this year.

"I've helped figure out the sex of chicks the day they're born, I've helped sort them, I've helped pick up eggs, I've helped wash eggs, I've seen the brooding houses that they're in when they're four or five weeks old. It's just an awesome experience."

Now after spending around $1,000 dollars on materials, and putting in two-months of work, Miller has constructed his own 50x20 foot pen on his property just west of York. The pen currently houses 38 pheasants that are all around four weeks old.

"It has a sheltered section which they can get out of the sun, get out of the cold, out of the wind at night; hopefully it will keep them away from predators a little bit. Then they've got this 40x20 area out here that they can fly in, they can look for insects in, kind of give them a little bit of the sense that they're in the wild."

Once he masters the art of raising pheasants Miller says he hopes to begin integrating the birds into his curriculum this spring.

"Ultimately I would like to have chicks in the classroom for two or three weeks. I would like to do some incubation at the school. We have a device called a Surrogator, which we can take pheasants out into the wild and release them in the wild so there's lots of different items we can do."

Miller added that in addition to providing learning opportunities for his students he's hoping to use the pheasants he raises to help repopulate the area which he says has seen a decline over the past several years.