Well, here's a little Christmas mystery. Looking out of the window this frosty morning, I saw a scatter of white feathers on the lawn, and an avian corpse of some kind – a pigeon, I assumed, fallen victim to one of Lichfield's ubiquitous sparrowhawks. But no – when I went out to investigate, I found that what I had taken for a dead pigeon was actually an oven-ready, or almost oven-ready, pheasant. It was clearly not a bought one, as it was only partially plucked, and the weird thing was that it seemed to be pretty much untouched by crow or magpie or any carrion eater. Perhaps, I thought, it was from someone's freezer, and was still frozen hard, the morning being so cold – I didn't care to investigate too closely, but it certainly felt hard. But how did that partially-plucked bird get from that freezer onto my lawn? Did someone throw it out? They certainly couldn't have lobbed it into my garden, even if, for some bizarre reason, they had wanted to. I don't think any bird could have carried it – maybe a fox? But why would it bother lugging a solid, uneatable bird some distance, then leaving it exposed on a lawn for any passing carrion-eater to peck at? Anyway, I moved the corpse into a more sheltered spot, where I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens next.
In other news, I saw my first snowdrops of the year yesterday – the first day of the year. This was rather more cheering than finding a frozen pheasant on the lawn.
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