birds part#2

With the laying hens moved out into the field, I could now go on the hunt for some show birds to put in the green coop. I started an intense search for a male red golden pheasant. These beauties are hard to find. 

Our male red golden pheasant - photo credit: Andrew

We added silkies and two female red golden pheasants to the coop. The silkies make you smile with their puff of feathers on their head. They have a calm, quite character which helps balance the skittish pheasants.

This is a male partridge. He makes a cute chirping noise and he is enjoyable to watch with that feather sticking out of his head.

And now for a story.

After much time and effort I finally found a beautiful red golden male pheasant. I was thrilled when I brought him home and put him in the coop. I started searching for a female pheasant and finally found one for a breeding pair. Notice the word "finally." Around here, these pheasants are hard to find.

I was pretty pleased with my coop. I had a male and female pheasant and I managed to find this bird guy that had everything. I bought all sorts of birds. 

As we were carrying the birds into the coop, the male partridge burst out of the box and soared into the air. Now we were down to one female partridge bird. The next morning, two little birds were dead. It was sad, but I still had the male red golden, my prized bird.

Near the end of the school year, Tyler's preschool class came to our home for a field trip. There were 26 children and 24 adults that would be roaming around the property and having a picnic lunch in our backyard. I was excited to show them the animals and could hardly wait to hear their "ahhs" when they saw the red golden pheasant. 

Twelve minutes before they arrived, I had everything perfect and ready to go. There was one small problem-  a little sparrow was panicking in the coop and it was trying to find a way out. I opened up the coop door to let the sparrow out, and instead, my normally timid male golden, my prized bird, flew right over my head and out of the door. I screamed in horror. Adam acted fast and grabbed a net. He did a spectacular flying leap in the air and almost caught the bird. The bird, my beautiful prized bird who had spent its life in captivity instantly soared into the air and landed somewhere out in our field. Adam and I jumped over the fence, rolled up our pant legs in the tall, wet grass and started an intense search for this bird. I am embarrassed to write this, but I was moaning, groaning, and praying out loud all at the same time. It was pathetic. Adam and I ran around the field trying to find the bird, but only had a few minutes because all of the guests started to arrive. It was challenging to stop the thumping in my heart and change to a happy hostess when I really felt like crying. 

I wrote my sad story on kijiji in a wanted ad. I told the readers if they saw a beautiful red bird near our town: it was mine! Someone sympathetically responded and offered a delightful peacock instead.  Adam read the email with the peacock offer and told me that bird people were nuts -he had heard enough of my stories while picking up birds at different farms. After some thought, I decided to decline on the peacock since they are loud screechers only to find out it was a friend playing a joke on me. She got me good!

I immediately began my search for another red golden and finally found one. Hopefully we don't have anymore bird adventures!

And I know what some of you are thinking: if it isn't birds escaping, its little boys. Just so you know, our littlest boy likes it here at home...thankfully.

update: after some frantic running around this morning, we caught all of the birds that escaped except for a female pheasant. Thankfully we still have one more. If you happen to see a larger, dull, brown bird running around in town - that would be mine:)

We need more locks.