The Ukrainian Pheasant

 

Do you get these gawdbedamned things down south?

There’s no help for it. Mort is going to have to be flogged. I just happened to look out the window…and the retarded mutt was lounging in the snow, nose to beak with this little %#@&*€. With a fast snap of his mighty jaws - he could have eaten him and earned my undying gratitude. But they just sat there, side by each…sharing the day like the best of friends. A-holes!!!

😡

When I was a kid on the farm I used to try to shoot these buggers. Every summer they’d sit outside my bedroom window and squawk at 5:00 in the morn: “YAK GAKGAKGAK! YAK GAKGAK!” They’d sit on the front patio or nearby trees doing that… and the second I went for the .22…the sonsabitches were gone. They’d steal food out of the cat dish out front, they’d raid the bird feeders… and I swore that one day…I’d kill one of these things. I don’t think I ever did though. They come by in the city all the time now because they know - somehow…that I can’t shoot them. They’ll snuggle up to Mort because they know he won’t eat them. They wouldn’t go near the neighbour’s dawg because they knew that he’d rip them to shreds. They used to gang up on him: one would fly down and dance and yak right at the limit of the dawg’s chain, and the poor dawg would lose his mind barking and snarling at it while he strained at his chain…while the other bird would sneak in behind and clean out his food dish. Then they’d switch. The poor pup would end up at the day exhausted and hungry. They have ESP and seem to know instinctively who their friends and enemies are.

I see on OyTube they have adult pellet guns again. These aren’t the toys we played with as kids - they are $2200.00 precision tools with top end Nightforce optics and bipods and can take critters out past 100 yards. They are just the ticket in the city because they’re totally quiet and much less lethal than even the little .22. Baloney Bob bought one 100 years ago and we’d sit on his back deck, get sloshed on red wine and shooting in his back yard. Any magpies that came round were dead meat.

It was all fun and games till one day, we spotted a tree full of them and Bob went to work, quietly sniping the ones at the bottom and slowly moving up. He’d gotten about four or so when when the rest got wise and flew outta Dodge. 

Unfortunately the old bint that owned the property was mortified. At the time West Nile Disease was going round, carried by small pests and varmints and they could give it to humans. When she saw all the dead Ukrainian pheasants, she called the city’s Department Of Dead Birds…and they sent someone out to collect the bodies and take them in to the lab for examination. We wisely put the gun away and behaved ourselves after that. 

I wonder if Bob still has that rifle?