Pheasantly Surprised

A rare sighting before the field grass grew up.

As much as I want a couple of goats and a donkey and a pig, all pets, of course, I have to accept that we are bird people. As much as I want farm fur, I'm resigned to being surrounded by feathers.
For several years, my husband has been slightly obsessed by pheasants, this mild obsession started perhaps by seeing them abundantly during our 2010 trip to Scotland but fuelled at home by the presence of a mostly heard but not seen male pheasant whose "gronks" we hear in the shrubs and tall grass around our property.
For a few winters, he showed up underneath the bird feeders in our front yard but we thought the heavy snow of 2015 may have been the end of him. Happily, he survived to gronk again.
A few weeks ago, I looked out the bathroom window and saw something on the gravel pile. I wondered if one of our chickens had flown the coop then I realized it was the pheasant.
"I've got to get him a female," Dwayne declared.

We love babies! Although these are more like toddlers.

After a couple of years of trying, Dwayne finally tracked down young pheasants to buy and we picked them up on Tuesday night. We now have ten settling in to their new abode in our backyard. They will be released in the fall, not for hunting but for our personal enjoyment.

Sitting on the back deck looking at our array of bird houses, my husband swept his arm out and said, "Ospreys, chickens and pheasants. We are a bird sanctuary."
Come the fall, we'll see how our pheasants fare in the wild; we might end up being the bird brains.