/_images/misc/misc/pheasant.jpg Having a little lie-in on Saturday morning, my ears were tuned to the a-bit-past-dawn chorus of birdlife outside beyond the pulled curtains.
There was the usual array of tweeting from feathered friends whose names I have always struggled to remember, except for the obvious ones like the robin and the blue tit.. and maybe the sparrow.
I really should tune in to Bill Oddie’s autumn watch and try to latch on to some more ‘exotic’ nomenclature. I’m quite attracted to natural world documentaries, but the vast proportion of information I find so fascinating during the programme usually drifts aimlessly from my memory the moment it is finished. It’s like a lot of scientific information… it just doesn’t stick in my bonce.
However, among the ‘callers’ waking the world outside were the geese in our field, setting up their occasional caterwauling for seemingly no good reason and, much closer than usual, the local celebrity free-flying parrot, Elvis, who was muttering "Hello" and "How are you" from the branch of a tree somewhere very close to our bedroom window.
By way of a slight digression, I was also the victim of a jolly text jape later in the morning which involved having the sound track to a duck’s quacking sent over the airwaves to my mobile, but that’s another story.
But back among the chirping and tweeting that was building up outside there suddenly came a very different bird sound that somehow struck a chord, as it were, with my non-scientific brain cells, but I couldn’t quite place its author.
It took a much more switched-on wife to look out of the window and spot a gorgeously-plumed cock pheasant strolling majestically round our lawn.
Experts may be able to confirm my suspicions, but I had thought that there seemed to be a lot more pheasants to be seen out and about on the moors, and this sighting so close to home I reckon adds weight to my baseless theory.
So, for the best part of an hour, I watched the brightly coloured bird treat our garden pretty much as his own, and even our dog gave due reverence to its imperial demeanour by not going barking mad as he strolled past the sun lounge doors.
Had it been a hedgehog.. as has happened on quite number of occasions… our border collie-alsatian cross would have gone bananas, and the hedgehog would, in all probability, have adopted that very smug attitude of totally ignoring our dog’s tantrum from half inch on the other side of the window pane.
But for the cock pheasant, the dog remained comfy in her bed, and simply watched him make his slow and measured way up into the field and away.
Bill Oddie, I’m sure, could have filled in all the details about the life of a cock pheasant, but it was enough for this amateur bird watcher to wonder at the beauty of nature in its complex simplicity.