  
 
I woke one morning last week to a quiet house, before anyone else was awake, and was pleased to see a pheasant in the front garden. No doubt this is a mundane event to any Englishman reading this entry, and admittedly I have seen pheasants previously during my visit, as they're very commonplace, but I had generally only caught glimpses of these exotic-looking birds as they flew away from me while hiking or as they scurried up the bank away from the car as it rounded a curve. A grouse in my own country would be just as banal yet equally as difficult to photograph. At any rate, this pheasant was just outside the kitchen window, leisurely picking through the grass for anything that might have fallen from the feeder, oblivious of my existence a few feet away on the other side of the glass. He was still a bit farther away then I would have liked, and the window wouldn't open in such a way as to permit a better view, but despite these factors I was able to take a couple of decent photographs:  
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