A pair of Ring-necked Pheasants like I used to see all of the time during the latter half of Autumn in Southeastern Pennsyalvania where yours truly grew up.
The weeks between Halloween and the American Thanksgiving holiday are a pleasantly quiet time if you enjoy increasingly slate gray skies, earlier dusk, chillier temperatures, and garments made of tweed, corduroy, and wool flannel. It is also the time of year when I most miss SE Pennsylvania. I grew up in rural Berks County in a restored 200-year old fieldstone farmhouse, outside of Philadelphia and between the smaller cities of Allentown and Reading where, at the time, there was still lots of farming. Holstein dairy cattle and feed corn mostly.
When the corn had been harvested, you would see and hear pheasants like the pair above with their funny calls to each other and sudden, startling actually, flight from the fields if something rattled them. Invariably, one or two would cross your field of vision and fly across the country roads as you drove by on the way home late in the afternoon or around dusk. I miss that.
The Midwest is nice enough, and I've been out here (Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois) for over twenty years thanks to school and now work. There are times, though, when I'd give my eye teeth to pull up roots and return to Pennsylvania. If for no other reason than to see the pheasants, which, my parents inform me, I used to refer to as "silly pheasants" when I was very small thanks to the funny, metallic sound they make when they call out to one another.
-- Heinz-Ulrich
Sadly, no more wild pheasants in Penna. But I know exactly what you are talking about.
ReplyDeleteThat's too bad. But if someone could magically transport my family and me to a pleasant (pheasant) spot somewhere in SE Pennsaylvania, I'd go in a flash and not look back.
ReplyDeleteOne can still hunt at preserves where they raise and release pheasants….it provides the experience but not the verities.
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