This time of year, it isn’t so much the deer I worry about while traveling our highways and bi-ways. It’s the pheasants. I learned last Friday morning, it isn’t just me who worries about or brakes for those majestic creatures.
A white van cruising ahead of me on County Road 29 hit his brakes, slowing considerably. My first thought? The guy was drunk. Then I reasoned, no, he couldn’t be. It’s only 9:15.
That’s when I caught sight of a familiar pair of ring-neck rooster pheasants scurrying across the road, just in time. They were zipping through the field as I passed by, safely out of harm’s way, and that was good. It’s always my fear that one or both of those pheasants isn’t going to cross the road in time and they’ll be gone, poof! in a flurry of feathers.
I’ve been an avid fan of pheasants since my younger days when I raised them for the Pheasants Forever guys or the Sportsman’s Club or some such organization. A guy would bring me the chicks; I would raise them and love them and set them free.
As with the song of Bangladeshi birds, I can’t reproduce the sound pheasants make when tossed to the wind. “Chortling” is a fair description, but that would mean the pheasants are “gleefully chuckling” as they’re winging away.
Well, freedom is rather gleeful so, yeah, let’s stick with “chortling.”
Of all my experiences with pheasants, whether it be raising babies or setting them free or watching a pair of males fighting in the back yard, my favorite pheasant story takes place in, of all places, a nursing home.
During my sophomore year of high school, I decided to use a full-grown rooster pheasant as part of a science project. It would be easy. I would talk about pheasants while my classmates admired the live bird, caged on the lab table. It would be impressive, a sure-fire “A.”
The night before my presentation, Dad built a small cage and captured the rooster from the coop. We loaded it in the car and covered it with a sheet to keep it from freaking out. Mission accomplished.
The next morning, I got in my car and, hearing nothing from the back seat, I headed off to school. I was excited. My science presentation was going to be awesome.
But then...
Imagine my surprise when I got to school, lifted the sheet from the cage and discovered my science project was dead. Not just a little dead either. Completely dead. Oh sure, I hoped against hope the pheasant was only sleeping soundly. Nope. It was dead.
The nearest phone was at Divine Providence, so I headed inside to call Dad and ask what I should do. One of the nice nurses said I could use a phone. I dialed home.
“He’s dead, Dad. I got here, I lifted the sheet. He’s dead. I’m sure, Dad. He’s not moving.”
Dad’s solution was he would bring in another live pheasant, a hen because the last rooster had just died. My science project wouldn’t be quite so spectacular but it would suffice.
As I waited for the replacement pheasant, outside Divine Providence, I could never have imagined the flurry of activity going on inside. It seems my conversation had been overhead and the nurses understood it to mean one of the male residents had been found under a sheet, not moving, dead. But which resident? Who had been found dead?
A room-to-room search yielded no results, of course, because no male human had died, just a male pheasant, my science project, my sure-fire “A.”
I never did like science.
