Yesterday (Tuesday 6th) afternoon around 5pm, I noticed a lovely male Pheasant stalking up and down along the low cyclone fence between our and the neighbors' yard. It seemed like he was wanting to come over into our yard, but couldn't figure out to flutter over the fence. At one point it hunkered down, lying right against the wire parallel to the fence, for about 3 minutes, then got up and finally wandered away from the fence across the neighbors lawn and through a laurel hedge to the next property. Timeframe somewhere between 5 - 10 minutes. I live about a mile from the Edmonds ferry dock, in a well-established neighborhood, about a block from the train tracks/beach.

At no point did it seem frightened, hurried, or startled...just insistent in wanting to get through the fence to our yard. During this time, I had called the neighbors, who both came out to watch from about 40 feet away.

The neighbors speculated that it was an escapee, since it acted so unskittish. I am reserving judgment, although I don't deny that that's a reasonable and likely possibility (let us not forget, however, Black Bears in Discovery Park, etc.). Which brings to my mind all the recent discussion about the Verdin and unusual sightings in general, so I'd like to share an experience I had while living in Hawaii, which bolstered my philosophy on keeping a very open mind on unusual/unexpected sightings in nature.

I trained in local fish ID for fish population surveys (voluntary), and for the time I was there, was as deeply into reef-life observation and ID as I ever was in birding. One day in 12 to 15 feet of water, I saw fish I'd never seen before, and looking in the two best "expert" ID books learned that around Hawaii, adults of this fish were found only at depths of 100+ feet, most often 300 or more! There was no mistaking the ID of these distinctive fish, and they weren't juveniles (which were known to be seen occasionally in the shallows). I got my husband out there and luckily the fish were still in the area. I took him to the local aquarium, where he picked the fish out in the mixed display of several varieties of this type of fish, further verifying what I was sure we'd seen. I e-mailed the author of one of the fish books, with whom I'd communicated in the past. He said he trusted my sighting, but because he only knew of juveniles being observed in the shallows, he really grilled me on what I had seen. Eventually he was satisfied enough to update his write-up on this fish to reflect that, in Hawaii, adults had been observed in the shallows, but it was an anomaly. Realizing that fish are not birds...my point is that sometimes the unexpected does occur. Whether blown by storm winds or inadvertently trapped in a vehicle and transported (is that so much different than a seed hitching a ride caught on an animals pelt, or being carried and spread in a digestive system?), nature can and will continue to surprise us just when we think we have things all figured out. Of course, sometimes common sense just has to prevail, like when a parakeet showed up eating weed seeds along the road next to my fence last summer -- I really could not entertain the idea that it had blown there in a storm from Australia! (He had a band and acted very hungry, so I captured him in my garden hat and found his owner on Craigslist...she'd lost him 2 weeks prior.) Nonetheless, hopefully we all keep a little smidgeon of "maybe/perhaps" in reserve, either way, seeings as we are dealing with Nature . . . thanks for listening, and happy birding!

Dee Warnock
beachdee at hotmail.com
Edmonds


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