Jousting with the marquis

'Jousting with the marquis' or 'the Swinhoe Saga'

The Marquis is a Beautiful Male Swinhoe Pheasant. He lives with his three ladies in an aviary in the back garden and has been displaying increasingly aristocratic tendencies as the Winter has progressed...personally I think I've been accidentally provoking his ire with my daily ritual of stamping the ice out of his upturned black rubber water bowl. This ritual has obviously been interpreted as a threat to his Social standing/Ladies safety/his ego or some other unforgivable insult..the ritual now has been modified to include jousting with the said Marquis.. and he has even begun to include the variation of a couple of flounces through the door after the intruder (Me)

Talk about bird brained aristocrats... It's freezing cold and I'm trying to toss in scoops of oiled corn, pellets and sunflower seed mixture and the Marquis is doing his darned best to get in the way and scare me off, bouncing . fluffing and flouncing... he's a sturdy bird with a decent set of spurs so I wouldn't like to underestimate him.. but he's unintentionally amusing and (don't let him hear me say this) a little absurd.

He's now added the confidence boosting variation(well for him it is) of jumping up onto the perch that runs by the door ...and supervising from on high while I duck underneath to collect the bowl ... good job I'm wearing a fleece hat is all I can say.

He continues his defence of bird land by not giving up on his watch on me when I feed the birds in the pen next door.. it shares a wall, only a little of which you can see through and he's found that if he jumps on top of the night box and peers round the corner he can see me ..but if that's what it takes that's fine by him..so I feed the next pen well aware that an irate Marquis is craning his neck round a corner , whilst balanced on the top of the box all in order to glare intimidatingly at me. I could get a complex.

We did have a cold snap a few weeks ago that cooled his ardor somewhat (like completely) he sat sadly upon his perch and didn't take any notice of me...so because Swinhoe's tend to look a little off , then promptly die.. I had to arrange a heat lamp over his perch pretty darn quickly and fortunately he lived to flounce another day!

for more information on Swinhoe pheasants see here

http://www.gbwf.org/pheasants/swinhoe.html