Field Notes—

A Straggler Along The Way Of Change

By Curtiss Clark

Our place is just a short walk down the road from what used to be a dairy farm. My grandfather owned and operated the farm 70 years ago, and there are still a few features on the landscape that might be familiar to him if he were alive today.

The farm pond is still there, along with some stone rubble where his milk house used to be and a few feral lilacs that used to flank the house. But the house and the farm buildings are all gone. Most of the old farm now has corporate owners who built their headquarters on the hill and spun off some of the pastureland and fields to residential developers. There is now a cluster development of $600,000 homes on the eastern end of the property, bearing the name of the farm, Avalon, that is now long gone.

Over generations, this accelerating transformation of meadows, pastures, and cropland into houses, lawns, and cul de sacs has pretty much changed the nature of the people living here from farmers to suburbanites. It has also changed the nature of the wildlife living among those people. We have more garden and garbage munchers, including deer, coyotes, and, alas, black bears. But we’ve lost almost all of our fireflies to chemical lawn treatments, and small mammals and various bird species in search of disappearing habitats have left for less developed areas. The Audubon Society reported last month that the populations of some popular and once-common birds, including northern bobwhites, evening grosbeaks, and eastern meadowlarks, have collapsed by as much as 80 percent over the last 40 years.

Notwithstanding all the development nearby, fields and woodlands still buffer our house, and we are privileged to host some stragglers, who appreciate familiar surroundings in a changing world. One such lonely wanderer showed up a couple of weeks ago.

The male ringed-neck pheasant is a spectacular bird about 30 to 35 inches in length, with most of that length accounted for by tail feathers that can reach 20 inches or more. He has a brilliant green-blue head with vermillion skin patches around the eyes, and a white ring around his neck. The body and wing feathers are burnished bronzes and golds with surprising sky blue feathers mixed in.

Kate was the first to spot this solitary male while she was working out in the yard. A pheasant would rather run than fly, so while Kate followed at a distance, he turned his head this way and that to keep one golden eye on her while he beat a hasty retreat into the tall grass.

It would be a few more days before I spotted him. I heard him long before I saw him. His loud “here-I-am-girls” call is more alarm than melody and sounds like a cross between a crow and a rusty gate. It can be heard easily at a range of two hundred yards. If he is close enough, you can hear the fuffling of his beating wings before and after the call.

Eventually he wandered into view to investigate the fare at our feeders, and he’s been making regular appearances ever since. In the early morning and late afternoon, he snacks on sunflower seeds spilled from the feeders above by the hard-charging grosbeaks, blue jays, and redwing blackbirds.

Pheasant are polygynous, which means that the cocks assemble and defend a harem of as many as 12 hens in a territory they establish as early as March. The hens select nest sites in open fields or along hedge or fencerows in April and May, and the brood hatches by mid-June. The hatchlings are ready to go and spend only a about day in the nest, so by the time our male showed up in the neighborhood, his parental duties — if he ever had had any — were pretty much done for the year.

We haven’t seen any hens despite the desperate calling of our solitary male at dawn. Whether it’s a warning to territorial interlopers or a call for seduction, it is going unheeded except by those of us trying to get some sleep. His sense of timing is off. We’ve taken to calling him Valentino for all his flamboyance and self-absorption.

Increasingly, this odd, jarring call is not a call of the wild. It is likely that Valentino grew up in a pen. Pheasant were first imported into this country from their native ranges in Asia early in the 19th Century. They are prized game birds because of their size and their wily facility for escape. For the past century, the State of Connecticut has introduced pheasant to public hunting grounds to supplement the grouse and quail populations. Even though the suitable habitats have been dwindling, the state still stocks about 50 locations around the state with the birds. Last year, the Connecticut bought 17,153 pheasant from breeders for release.

Despite this annual infusion of thousands of birds into Connecticut’s ecosystem, few pheasant show up in the state’s tally for the Audubon Society’s annual Christmas Bird Count. Just 30 ring-necked pheasant were spotted around the state in the 2006-2007 count.

As much as his demeanor may suggest otherwise, Valentino’s future as a great lover is limited — not just by the lack of breeding habitat but by the clock as well. Pheasant don’t live very long in the wild. Many of this spring’s hatchlings won’t make it past the end of the year. Even if he is somehow successful in securing a harem, Valentino probably won’t be around for the next breeding season.

Generations come and go. Too quickly, it seems. Whether it’s between our house and the erstwhile Avalon down the road, or between a dislocated pheasant and his unlikely descendents, the links of continuity are under a strain imposed by rapid change. It’s affecting our sense of timing. We can react by lamenting the loss of a past or a future or both. Or we can look at the astonishing beauty of what turns up unexpectedly in our yards and resolve to do our small part, day by day, to preserve a place where such wonders are still possible.