# Freddy the Fighting Pheasant



## Shu (Oct 21, 2003)

From the WI Outdoor News:

Why would a pheasant come to a man's home for no apparent reason except to pick a fight?

Pat O'Brien doesn't have the answer to the question. He just knows it happened. Not just once, but for five months.

It was a March day last year, O'Brien recalls, that he had loaded sawdust and wood shavings from his workshop. He unloaded the trailer back on his property and started the tractor engine.

A pheasant came trotting out of the brush and approached the tractor. As O'Brien drove back toward his garage, the bird got in front of the tractor. Every time the tractor turned, the bird moved to stay in front of it.

At that point, O'Brien interrupts his story to acknowledge that nobody would believe this story if he didn't have pictures and if other people hadn't witnessed this pheasant in action. Then he returned to the tale of Freddy the Pheasant. That's the name Nancy, Pat's wife, gave the bird.

"I just figured it was a pen-raised bird that was used to the sound of an ATV motor every time it got fed," he said. "It hung around, so I got some corn and put it down for the bird. It wasn't much interested in the corn, but it hung around.

"It got where he was here continually. Bill Ingalls (one of O'Briens' neighbors) was out trapping gophers with his ATV engine running and the pheasant was watching him from across the ditch."

The pheasant was around so much that O'Brien began to understand how to communicate with the bird and anticipate some of the things it might do. He learned, for instance, that if the bird wasn't around, all he had to do was slap the hull of his aluminum boat near the garage and the bird would show up.

Freddy started following him to the mailbox. Then Freddy started following the car every time the O'Briens left the house and drove down the driveway.

"It got where we had to drive like mad out of the driveway to get away from him before we got out to the road."

They didn't want Freddy to be hit by a car.

"I don't think he knew he could fly," O'Brien said. "He just always ran."

That changed one day when O'Brien was driving his SUV. He recalls that whenever the pheasant got running real fast, its wings would start flapping. The difference this day was that suddenly the pheasant was airborne.

It was about this time that O'Brien began to interpret some of the bird's "language." He realized that when he put out corn, Freddy was pecking and scraping the ground with his beak, but wasn't picking up any corn.

"He was being aggressive," O'Brien said. "He was telling me, 'This is my turf.' "

Aggressive is just the right word, too. One day Freddy was doing his usual thing in walking with O'Brien to the mailbox. But there was a change.

Freddy gradually fell behind O'Brien. The next thing he knew, Freddy was attacking the backs of his calves with the spurs on his legs.

"He wasn't a big mature rooster. His spurs were only about three-quarters of an inch long."

Just the same, they weren't welcome on the back of O'Brien's legs. He swatted at the bird and it backed off.

Not much later, O'Brien was mounting new lights on his boat trailer and Freddy again assaulted his calves.

"You know, when this pheasant first showed up, he was really interesting. Then he got amusing. Now, he was plain aggravating."

Fortunately for the bird, although O'Brien enjoys a pheasant dinner as much as anyone, he's an ethical man not about to dispatch this bird out of season. The attacks started to became routine. Freddy became Freddy the Fighting Pheasant.

When O'Brien made his trip to the mailbox, he got into the habit of carrying a stick, broom, or leaf rake to beat the bird away.

How aggressive can a bird get?

Freddy even began attacking the tires on the mower when O'Brien was driving around cutting the grass.

One day, Freddy was assaulting a tire as the mower passed close to a tree. The bird got trapped between the tire and the tree, got run over and lost some tail feathers. O'Brien was sure that was the end Freddy.

Not so. Freddy hopped up and ran off. He was limping on one leg; sometimes just hopping along on one leg.

Well, good riddance, O'Brien thought.

Also not so. Freddy reappeared three days later, but wasn't quite so aggressive.

Briefly, that is.

"One day, I was in the garden working and he came over. He paced back and forth outside that fence like he couldn't wait to get at me.

"He got to be a pest again. He was getting to be a pain. I couldn't do anything without him attending. I was beginning to think of pheasant dinner," O'Brien said. "By this time, he'd started cackling and flapping his wings all the time."

O'Brien figured this was yet another way for Freddy to let him know who was boss around those 40 acres.

One day O'Brien was hooking up his utility trailer and had on gloves. Freddy flew at him. Yes, by now, Freddy had figured out he could fly and had added aerial assault to his weaponry.

It was about August now.

In all this time, the bird had been sort of shy around Nancy. Freddy never bothered her.

But Freddy made a mistake that day in August and it did attack her.

That was all for O'Brien.

Freddy got close and O'Brien dropped a plastic milk crate over Freddy, trapping him.

While O'Brien was getting a sheet of cardboard to slide under the crate, the bird flipped the crate and escaped, ready to resume the war.

This time O'Brien added a concrete block on top of the milk crate and Freddy's fate was sealed.

O'Brien loaded the bird into the back of his pickup and drove it a considerable distance the other side of Webster and released Freddy in a field there.

"By now, he didn't have any tail feathers and it couldn't fly right," said O'Brien. "He tried to fly after the truck, but was wobbly in the air."

That was the last he saw of Freddy.

It was quite an experience for the O'Briens.

"It was interesting at first," O'Brien said. "Then it got amusing, then challenging, then a downright nuisance. I learned how to talk pheasant and fight pheasant."


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