It’s hunting season on Cape Cod – the hound and I wear orange in the woods. I have no objections to hunting done responsibly. But it reminded me that not all hunts are equal. Some are for the unexpected … and some turn out unexpectedly. And sometimes there is a happy ending.
Last month, the hound and I were walking on the road near Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary in Barnstable when a car pulled up and the driver leaned out the passenger window.
“Have you seen a rooster?” she asked. Well no, but then we hadn’t really been looking for a rooster, since the road borders a WILD-life sanctuary. “Someone abandoned a rooster at the sanctuary yesterday, and I’m trying to save him from a bad death by coyote,” she said.
The driver was Haley Winfield, the office manager at the sanctuary who, in an effort to find her quarry, had walked up and down Bone Hill Road clucking like a chicken. She told me she was good at it. And the rooster apparently agreed since he had responded to her although not revealed himself.
I promised to keep an eye out, and so the hound and I also wandered up and down the road. I, at least, was clucking. But my attempts at chicken speak were poor, or the hound was too scary, and we got no response. I was surprised since the rooster at my daughter’s farm thinks I’m pretty entertaining.
But, good news, the rooster, who was canny enough to survive a few weeks in the wild, was re-captured November 8 by a concerned neighbor. And Hayley reports that his life is now good. He lives over the bridge with a bird-lover who has christened him 'Ripple' in honor of his fancy feathers and a Grateful Dead song.
Another bird, bred to be wild, was also lucky. Decades ago, my husband went hunting in what was then a wilderness of woods off Route 6A where the Kings Way condominiums now stand in Yarmouth Port. Honestly, I think he liked the idea of hunting more than the reality, but liked being out in the woods with the dog. And he had a fancy Abercrombie and Fitch hunting jacket with a big game pocket in the back lining.
At some point the dog – purely by accident I’m sure – flushed a ring-necked pheasant. The birds are not native to the Cape, but even now the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife releases about 40,000 at locations around the state – a bit of a controversy among hunters. Back in the day, they were raised at the East Sandwich Game Farm, now a conservation area.
When the dog flushed this particular pheasant, it flew straight up in the air … and then dropped out of the sky like a rock. My husband never even got the shotgun to his shoulder. He was then totally flummoxed as to what to do with a comatose pheasant, so he popped it into the game pocket of his coat, walked out of the woods like a big-game hunter, and brought it home.
“Did you have any luck I asked,” when I got home from work. “Uh, yeah,” he said and took me out to the driveway and popped the car trunk. A very live pheasant stared up at me.
We brought it in the house for the night, somehow keeping it away from the dogs, and took it the next day to the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History – there being no wildlife rescues in that era.
It was simply starving to death, a naturalist said, since as a farm-raised, non-native bird, the Yarmouth woods didn’t offer an easy buffet. The museum, however, agreed to offer him sanctuary.
I don’t think my husband ever went hunting again. And I like to think the pheasant lived out his life in the shelter of the museum’s feeding stations. Maybe he even met a rooster or two.
