Every morning when we start work we are greeted by a hen Pheasant at the Farm House door, she is always pleased to see us, for she knows that she will get a handful of sunflower hearts that we feed to the birds in the feeders. With this particular bird it started when she would wait under the bird feeders with other Pheasants for the odd seed that the birds dropped, she got a bit wise and realised where the feed came from, near the farm house.
It is good to see Pheasants around the farm, but they are only there because of the farmers who have game shoots on their farms and have released them in the first place. If I had a choice of having them on the farm or of hearing the guns when they are shot, I think that I would prefer not to have the Pheasants. For it is not a very pleasant sport.
We had a year or two back, Wild Boar, one of the supermarkets before being taken over give us their out of date and overs bread and cakes for their feed, within a very short while we had as many as seventy Pheasants in the pen at a time feeding with the Wild Board, they were not to impressed and would mop up all that went over a certain area so that the Pheasant would not get any, it never worked, the Pheasants got pretty fat on the bread and cakes.
Most of the Pheasants are, or will soon get trusting, they have been in contact and fed by humans from day one. At the moment we have quite a few that hang around, either near the horse feed when we feed them or other places that we may at time spill a little feed.
Every now and then we get a Road Runner, who will wait at the entrance of the farm yard, waiting for cars leaving, they sometime do it for months and seem to be always there when you leave. As the cars approach on leaving, it starts chasing by the side and keeps racing at a considerable speed, some times for up to seventy yards, until it must get worn out. I can only imagine that he sees vehicles as a threat. When they stop chasing, we always wonder what happened to them.