Well, here is an oddity! This bird landed on our deck, out of nowhere and looked pretty lost. After looking it up on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology All About Birds site here, we identified it as a Chukar.
This is a game bird introduced from Pakistan and usually lives in rocky regions in the western US and southern Canada. Obviously, if it was on our deck, it was waaaaaaay off the reservation! Well, I happen to know that one of my former clients about 7 miles away raises game birds and this is one of the types they raise. Nevertheless, they keep them in pens until their time is up so this guy must have decided that ‘freedom was a precious thing’ and let himself out of the pen!
He looks pretty contented there, but he took off for parts unknown not too long after.
