Controlling Nature fall came back to life no matter how cold the winter or deep the snow. In
the garden, ladybugs always landed on my forearms and crawled along
tomato vines. All were symbols of the resilience of the natural world.
So too were pheasants. Our alfalfa fields not only grew hay, they
provided habitat. With their long feathered tails and the males’ vibrant
colors, pheasants were wily birds that, when threatened, preferred to run
rather than fly. When they did breech their cover, they launched without
warning; their flapping wings nearby never failed to startle me.
One summer day, I was riding along with my father when he suddenly
stopped the tractor and powered down the mower. A male pheasant had
been decapitated. He put the bird into a box and had me carry it to the
house with instructions to ask my grandmother (his mother-in-law, who
was visiting) if she would prepare it for dinner. I did as he asked, but my
mother made sure the request was never repeated!
When I was old enough to take over the mowing, I kept one eye on
the mower’s cutting bar and the other on steering the tractor. Sometimes,
a pheasant would fly up in front of me. Other times, I saw alfalfa leaves
stirring about as they scurried for safety. Some birds waited until the
last possible moment to run, barely escaping the knives on the cutting
bar’s far end.
When the mower kept breaking down, my father purchased a swather.
The new machine, with its nearly ten-foot cutting bar, metal paddle reel,
and dual pinching rollers, dwarfed the old mower. The swather not only
cut alfalfa, it compressed and pushed the cut hay out the back, forming
neat windrows ready for baling in a couple of days. With the swather, the
time required to cut and prepare hay for baling dropped by half.
It was only after I picked up a bale of hay, smelled the pungent
remnants of a pheasant carcass, and saw bits of buried feathers that
I realized what was happening—the swather was too wide for some
pheasants to outrun. It was an early lesson that I could damage nature,
even without meaning to.
Regrettably for the pheasants, they held little value to anyone but bird
hunters and a few farmers. As time passed, pheasants all but disappeared,
unable to escape modern farming equipment or find habitat in the midst
of urban development. As party to their disappearance, I witnessed how
the environment did not always bounce back in the way I wanted.