When you live in the country you're liable to see just about any wild critter on your property. We've had deer, possums, rabbits, field mice, hawks and a grebe. That's in addition to somewhere between twenty and thirty species of birds.
But one thing you seldom see in the Ohio countryside anymore is a pheasant. Northern Ohio used to have great pheasant hunting with a large wild population of birds. That all changed when the farmers tore out hedgerows and plowed up every acre of land they could possibly plant. When Earl Butz told them to plant fencerow to fencerow, that's just what they did.
That pretty much signed the death warrant for a wild pheasant population. You still see the occasional bird, but most of them are pen-raised birds the state has put out for hunters or escapees from a pheasant farm.
Today my son yelled out he saw a pheasant in the weeds between our property and the next one to the west. I looked and looked and saw nothing. Then I spotted a cock bird scooting out of the weed patch into the bamboo, where he disappeared.
We never saw him again, so I'm guessing he moved on, but you never know. There are plenty of good places for him to hide between the bamboo and the ditch. Big pine trees and a lot of weed that I stopped mowing last year. Be kinda cool if he came into the bird feeders. Probably never happen, but you never know.
Hope he was a wild bird and not an escapee. In either case, it was good to see a pheasant somewhere other than in the bead of my shotgun.
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