On the way back from a walk up the No. Line track this afternoon, I drove around a bend and saw a female pheasant sprinting along the road. I slowed the car, and when she ducked through the fence into the paddock, I stopped the car. Fortunately, I had the camera on the seat next to me and the window down. I didn't manage a photograph of her, but did get a few of the two poults with her. Most of the photographs were hazy because of intervening out-of-focus grasses and weeds, but this one turned out OK after a bit of fiddling with the contrast and clarity.
I never fail to get a thrill from seeing wild pheasants.
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f4 at 1/100 sec.; ISO 200]
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So much what dinosaur cousins looked like, I imagine. If as a kid I could have seen them as feathered and possibly brightly colored, I think I'd've been a lot more interested. Ancient and spare creatures, with long, long, long lineages.
ReplyDeleteZhoen, yes, I agree — that head in particular looks so dinosaur-like. Harder to imagine birds like finches as dinosaurs, but the one that's impossible to look at and not think Archaeopteryx is the hoatzin. When I visited the Amazon I was hanging out to see a hoatzin, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. Crazy, wonderful dinosaurs that didn't quite complete the transition to birds.
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