My new backyard friend - a Ring-Necked Pheasant!

I was working from home yesterday afternoon and it was dead silent in the house. So quiet it was almost uncanny - that never happens at my place. Obviously it was a rainy, yucky day and the kid wasn't home from school yet. In the silence, I hear this really odd noise - like a dying rooster crossed with the creaking of metal on metal. I don't think I can even explain it in a way that makes sense! This went on for a little bit, then I realized the bus should be coming along...... I went to the door and pulled back the curtain - oooh! There's the bus coming around the corner. I whipped the door open in my way to let the driver know I'm there and I see something out of the corner of my eye........There, less than 15 feet away from me, is the handsomest male Ring-Necked Pheasant I've ever seen. Actually I think the last wild one I saw was a Golden, and I must have been in my teens. I don't remember ever seeing a wild Ring-Necked - just at the Gray Animal Farm or something. He and I looked at each other, and I had a fleeting thought to grab my camera and try for a pic then !!BOOM!! the child just off the bus yelling and screaming and running and, well - as you can imagine that bird was gone in a heartbeat. Monkey had just enough time to watch him go running through the woods, hightailing it to safer ground.

He didn't come back all afternoon, and I thought that perhaps that was it for me. Until this morning.....

Bubster got dropped off at 7:30 on the nose, and I opened the door for him to make the grand entrance and he says "you have a chicken looking thing on your back lawn", just as serious as can be. Then he ran past me to go play Lego Star Wars with the Monkey. I looked and sure enough, there was Mr. RN Pheasant strutting around my back yard. He wasn't getting away this time! I took plenty of photographs through the rain and the windows, well - you'll see below. He poked at my lawn and preened and called and puffed and ruffled his feathers, all under my watchful eye. He didn't care, what a show off.

I had posted an e-mail to our local birding distribution listing the night before, and one of my Maine Birding buds and fellow blogger Robin sent an e-mail explaining how they had one once that they named Phil. I asked the boys what we should name our new friend. "Darth Vader!" "Steve" "Anakin" "Dale! Like Dale Jr.!" As such, our new Pheasant friend's name is now... Dale. I'm hoping that Dale's girlfriend comes to visit too, it would be phenomenal to have a Pheasant family in the back field.

I better talk to my neighbors before they get any ideas........

Pretty nice place you got here....

Click for a link to hear his weird Pheasant call

There. Now where do you keep all the hens?