Ring-necked pheasants

The call came early one morning this week. We'd been anticipating it - the call that the post office had a package for us.

Hatcheries send ventilated boxes of live chicks all over the country. We'd ordered some baby chicks and ring-necked pheasants.

As I pulled out of the driveway I saw Pop cutting up a cardboard box and putting sheets of it along the edges of the pheasant cage. I rolled down the window.

"So the birds are here, huh, Pop?" I asked.

"The little shits are jumping out of the cage," he yelled back, obviously irritated. It made me chuckle.

"Need some help?" I asked, stepping out of the Jeep.

"The holes in the wire on the sides of this cage are too big," he said, still cutting the pieces of cardboard that wouldn't stay in place. "I've already had to catch two of them. You got some tape?"

"Not in the Jeep, but I can run back to the house," I said.

Pop asked me to run up to his garage instead, which I did, appearing shortly with a roll of duct tape.

We taped the cardboard walls along the side of the cage to prevent any premature disappearing acts. They'll leave anyway, but we'd prefer it be in a few months. Last year we raised about 10-12. Eventually, they out grew their cage and moved in with the chickens. They hung out around here for several weeks on their own accord before disappearing into the woods.

We had a few good laughs about them before they vanished. One of the neighbors, who knew we had them, stopped by one afternoon to tell what an aging neighbor had said.

"I met him right down there at the stop sign and he said, 'I swear I just saw a pheasant right down there at Bill's mailbox,'" the neighbor said with a grin. "He thought he was seeing things until I told him y'all were raising them."

One day, Dad was working on the bee hives with one of the local bee experts, who looked down the road leading to the barn and asked, "Are those pheasants?" Dad said yeah and had a rather lengthy conversation about them and the quail.

Mom took dinner to another neighbor one day and heard this, "I looked out that window yesterday and saw something I'd never seen before. Right there in the yard, was a ring-necked pheasant."

As I look into the cage at these new babies, I hope they'll eventually make their way out into the wild, find last year's birds and we'll hear a lot more of those stories. In fact, I hope that eventually we'll have a lot of pheasant sightings.

But for now, the best we can hope is that the little shits don't figure out they can fly out of the openings above their recently erected cardboard walls.