I wrote him into a post on Thursday night; about how he approached me asking for food, and how he got food, and how he was smaller than the other cock pheasants and therefore probably less able to compete for natural food. It could be that the bigger birds bully him out in the fields because birds sometimes do that sort of thing.
And so this evening it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him for three days. I asked myself whether the food I gave him on Thursday would be sufficient for three days. I can’t know whether it would or not, can I, because I’m not familiar with a pheasant’s dietary needs.
Perhaps, I thought, he’s been into the garden hoping to be fed again, but I wasn’t there so he left hungry. I’d never seen him fly onto either of the feeding tables, you see, as the other pheasants do, and I wonder whether he doesn’t have the strength. Pheasants are poor flyers at the best of times, and it takes some evident effort for even the big fit ones to make the flight-cum-leap from the ground up to a four foot high perch. And if Oliver is too weak to do that, what chance would he have of escaping a prowling fox?
So herein lies the lesson: it’s a bad idea to become attached to a wild creature because the wild is a hazardous place, and Mother Nature is implacably pragmatic and impervious to the needs of the singular individual.
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