A Visitor to our Garden

My Mister can be very liberal with the throwing out of seeds to our 5 hens in the mornings.  And this is what I think has prompted some new visitors to drop by.

This is a pheasant, fairly common around these parts, but before we kept hens I'd say that I'd only ever seen them in our garden once before.  This week we have seen three.  The first one had fairly short tail feathers with one bent downwards.  The second one was very noisy and soon jumped up onto the fence when he saw me looking out the window.  But this guy in the photograph, he was still there when I came outside with my camera as he was hopping on a sore leg.

Pheasants really don't want to be near people so he soon flew right up high and over the roof of our house.  This is a male pheasant, the girls are much smaller and very beige and dull coloured.  There are many pheasants around here as the large estate owners like to have their friends up from the city and go game shooting.  So they employ a game keeper on most estates who raise pheasants in the estate woodlands so that there are plenty around for the table.  Unfortunately they are not very smart birds and tend to walk right in front of cars all the time.
I saw a black one when I was driving today, on the side of the road.  I always keep my eye on them as they can be standing so still one second and then they dart right in front of your car the next.  I always honk my horn to try and teach them, just to do my bit to lessen the carnage at this time of year.

My hens didn't go near him, but they didn't seem too afraid either.

Whenever I go into the garden now, or even just look at them out of the window, they all gather towards me.  It is because Mister keeps giving them meal worms by the handful everyday and they are associating seeing one of us with food dropping from the sky.
It is a bad habit that I am going to have to break him of, as their poos are becoming very brown and very smelly from all the meaty worms he is feeding them, and of course it is me and not him who cleans out the hen house every week!

Here is my favourite photo taken this week, it's Bluebell.  Australorps have the loveliest eyes.