sweasel.com

We have ringnecks in these parts (Idaho), but that one is a super-pheasant! Bigger than any I’ve seen in the wild. Now and then I’ll be bicycling in the country and startle one… and they tend to startle right back by bursting from their hiding place into the air.

They are a prized game bird… getting increasingly rare because their habitat is shrinking due to ours expanding.

The Central Valley in CA has them, and their South American (I think) cousins Chukars. Lots of upland game to the north of Sacramento.

Lots of pheasant hunting in the Texas panhandle. It’s an industry. Husband didn’t like to hunt pheasant though, because the hunts are usually big, and he doesn’t like to hunt with anyone he doesn’t know—and some of them he won’t hunt with either.

P.S. Genuine authentic country decor includes tucking a few pheasant feathers behind a wall mirror or painting. My grandfather-in-law created a masterpiece when he hung his spurs on a wall hook made out of horseshoes, then stuck pheasant feathers behind the horseshoes. I can’t believe I never photographed it. I guess I thought we’d all live forever.

under glass here at my house….

We used to raise and release them around our house here in western NY, kind of like planting flower bulbs for us. I didn’t hunt the ones around here, just too pretty to look at when they gave a surprise appearance. Stopped doing it when the coyote population got out of control. We never saw or heard a single bird from the last batch we raised.

They are just as stupid, or more so, than what you speak about chickens. We had 50 day old chicks drown to near death in a 1/4″ or water when the watering bottle leaked into their tub. Fortunately, the better half came home just in time to resuscitate about 2/3 of them.

You can tell the one in the picture was pen raised in a somewhat crowded pen, the tail feathers are shorter than would be for a wild bird. In an overly crowded pen there would be no tail feathers. Other pheasants love pecking those tails off.

Yes; they’re easy to spot- they drive minivans

I grew up out in the sticks in SE Lower Michigan, and we had them all over the place. It was nothing to look out the back windows and see 6 or 8 of them in the backyard.

We had pheasants near our home in Roseburg, Oregon when I was a kid (1960’s, 70’s). I don’t remember seeing them as an adult, but I don’t live there anymore, just visit.

Wild turkeys were re-introduced to southern Oregon a number of years ago and now they’re everywhere! In people’s yards, downtown, I mean everywhere! But can you shoot one for Thanksgiving? Sure but it’ll cost you more in government fees and permits than buying one in the store all ready for cooking!!!

No pheasants, here in the desert we have sage grouse instead which are in the same family so close enough.

We had Irish pheasants when I was growing up, but they set fire to the bailey one day, and we had to don our hauberks and helms and drive them out.
After that Lord Yankee wouldn’t let them back in and they ended up building grotty little hovels outside the wall.

🙂

I used to flush them all the time when I was hiking back east. I’ve seen them here in West Texas as well along with wild turkeys of course.

Must be like bees, and horses, and cattle here in the US of A. Just more instances of cultural appropriation and importation of non-native species by the English!

Uncle B takes some mighty nice photos!

none here in the frozen freakin north. we have ruffed grouse and more ptarmigan than you can shake a hockey stick at. pheasants were a real pain at the suffolk base where i was stationed. they’d set off the motion alarms around the bomb dump and the alert pads, and they’d be all over the taxiways. i do remember removing the mangled bits of one from the main gear brakes after it got thumped by a jet on landing….

Pheasant, peasant, whatever. You’ve gotta go with the classic:

https://youtu.be/h0iAcQVIokg

We have lots of pheasants, and they’re city folk. They mainly inhabit the ravines between residential areas, but visit local parks and the downtown cemetery frequently. Wild turkeys are more neighborly, strolling from lawn to lawn, scratching out basking nests in our gardens. There’s a fully grown doe I sometimes frighten when I go outdoors to do yard work. She’s been spending a lot of time on the overgrown hillside behind our back hedge since mid-summer, jumping our fence to drink from our birdbaths and nibble on plum or mulberry leaves. We may be expanding our habitat, but the native critters don’t seem to mind.

I appreciate your sharing, the information is great and rewarding.

The fashion is very beautiful and very sexy.

I love when spammers try to write real sentences. Rule 34 for pheasants? And it’s featured in Asian fanfics? Perfect.

Also, great picture, Uncle B 🙂

Maybe they’ll make an offer for you to be their representative in expanding their valve company into the UK market. Be happy to send you the email if you’re interested.

I’d do it myself, but I’m about to become a wealthy Nigerian prince. Seems one of them died and left me all their possessions (dearest), including their pheasants. I just need to send $500 US for the bribes and payoffs to the other princes and I’ll be headed for Lagos.

No pheasants, [i]cher[/i]. We used to have peacocks walking around loose at the Audubon Zoo, strolling amid the customers; not sure if they still do, as I haven’t been there in a lotta years.

(I can’t believe I wrote [i]cher[/i] as if I were a real South Loozyanan. Since I was a kid I’ve never felt at home in this place, and have never thought there was anything really “southron” about me . . . but there it is.)

@Wolfus Aurelius. Do you put sugar in your corn bread? If you DO, then you are not a true Southerner (apparently).

I put a LOT of sugar in my corn bread, but I identify as a Texan.

Yankee cornbread = sweet. Southern cornbread = salty.

I confess, though: I’m partial to the sweet kind.

You can drink more Shiner with salty cornbread.

No pheasants on the central California coast, but damn! when/why did all these wild turkeys show up? They are the new Raccoon…

Sugar in cornbread? *Shudder*

Sometimes summer supper was a bowl of cold top milk and crumbled cornbread…topped with juicy ripe blackberries freshly picked and still warm from the sun. We kids would sit on the cool screened back porch and slurp it up. Life was good.

Getting a shotgun at age 12 was a rite of passage. We hunted quail, pheasants and ducks. Man, oh, man could Mom cook game. I can still smell the ducks slathered with maple cured bacon roasting…oh and she made a casserole thingie with pheasant pieces, pan gravy and wild rice that was stupendously good. We farm kids didn’t have much in the way of hoity-toity kulture, but we ate very well.

We have pheasants on the plains here in Colorado. I live just in the mountains, so miss them. However, we do have imported peacocks/hens in our neighborhood by the river. A neighbor a block to the east got 3 hens and 3 cocks. To keep peafowl, you have to a) cover their enclosure with strong netting and b) clip their outer wings so they can’t fly. He did neither and they got loose and stayed in the neighborhood. A neighbor to the west a few houses had them settle there and fed them. That lasted until he went on vacation and they got into his sunroom tearing it up. They are now settled on our block and a few around here, with at least two generations. Up until it got cold, we had one first generation male [we call him Dangerfield because he gets no respect from the other peafowl] and two males and a female from the younger generation here and the houses around ours. Now it is only Dangerfield with the others settling in nearby. We keep all the peafowl fed to keep them here because they are sheer hell on grasshoppers in Spring and Summer. If we get enough of them so that they become a problem I recently saw how to do a feather dressed peacock off of BBC, the recipe dating from Tudor times.