pheasants are dumb

When I was a child I loved the book Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. All I remember still was that the protagonists used to poach pheasants by using their stupidity against them (create a cone of paper, tuck a raisin at the tip, the pheasant will go for the raisin, get the cone of paper stuck on his beak, and then not move because a pheasant won't move if he can't see and the cone of paper covers his eyes). This made for amusing reading, but I figured no bird can be that dumb.

Anyway, when we arrived in the Cotswolds, we were at first shocked by the amount of road kill on the small winding streets. Soon we realized it was the same animal each time: pheasant. And then the other day we almost hit one and understood why they seem to pave the roads. He waddled out at just the wrong time, we slowed down, then he became aware of us and got spooked, turned around, changed his mind, turned back the way he was originally heading, looked at us again as though we might provide a solution, and then slowly toddled the rest of the way across the road. There was such a lack of self-preservation skill in this entire maneuver that I began to think maybe Roald Dahl was onto something.

Lately there have been a lot of pheasants on my walk. And they're dumb. They'll be perfectly hidden in the brush, and then just when I'm three feet away from them they'll panic and fly out into the open (which is always a bit shocking). Or they'll be walking in front of me, and they'll start waddling faster when they see me, but never change direction. They just keep waddling the exact way I'm walking (mind you there's lots of brush on either side they could duck into) until they reach panic level at which point they take to the air (again making them an easy target). This always makes me laugh.

So I mentioned to a British friend that pheasants seemed a bit too dumb to make for good hunting. She agreed and explained that they've set up all sorts of rules to try and make it more sporting, like the pheasant must be higher than 6' and lower than 20', or something like that. I'm not really sure how anyone shoots a pheasant anyway. I would think the reaction upon seeing the bird would be to burst out laughing rather than shoot.