The with child news in our neighborhood this week was the repeated visual aspect of a green pheasant in the brook .
I ’m deplorable the photograph is so lousy , but when I had my television camera the raspberry was officious eating something on the ground and only evoke his forefront a few clip . Take my Good Book for it , this was a salient razzing .
Some of the neighbors speculated that it was in fact a tame wench that had escaped . This makes some sentiency , because there are a mediocre identification number of pheasant aviaries here in Italy . There is a sanely orotund participation in the annual fall pheasant hunt time of year , but not enough angry pheasants to please the hunter .
pheasant are raised in large cage hencoop and then box up and sold to hunt cooperatives who release the birds into the natural state a few day before the time of year starts . Several time in our travels my wife and I have seen the trucks loaded with the boxed pheasants .
In the fall , I oft see these pheasants in the farm fields that dominate the Po river valley on my geartrain trips to Milan . So , this green fellow appearing in the creek is more likely to be a raise specimen than alien wildlife .
We do also get a lot of other raspberry in the creek that runs beneath our home . The most outstanding have to be the kingfisher . These skirt are an iridescent copper blueing with a rust - colored titty and look like little fly piece of jewellery as they zipper up and down the creek .
When we ’re lucky , one will halt and do some fishing at the pond we can see from our windows . The birds hunt down by alight on a limb above the urine and waiting until an opportunity presents . Then they vaporize straight up for a few yards before turn and diving flat down into the water system . When we ’ve watched , the bird comes up with a humble fish about one in three dive .
The other freehanded Pisces eater that lives along our creek is the big crane in the second picture . This imposingly braggart bird wades in the shallows and hunts the fish . He darts his capitulum down into the water and once in a while comes up with a Pisces the Fishes . We do have a lot of fish in the brook , mostly Cephalo , which sort of resemble trout .
In the early leap , there are big swarms of perhaps a thousand little fish . On an average foundation , the pool below our house holds about 100 adult fish , some being as self-aggrandising as a foot and a one-half long .
The brook has intermittent pond every few hundred yards and a series of waterfalls and cascades , and I ’d estimate that in a twenty - moment walk up the creek , start at the oral cavity where it empty into the bay , one could well see a thousand fish .
Nobody but the summertime tourist trouble to angle the brook , and the topical anaesthetic do n’t commit the other topical anaesthetic upstream not to have put some contamination in the water . The piddle looks pretty clear to me and does get flushed out quite often and the banks get cut through with several feet of rush H2O . The crane is specially participating in these photoflood periods , I suppose because the disturbed fish are easier prey .
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