Maggie's Farm

As an Ohio boy stranded in once-great California since my Viet Nam [

What happened to my comment??

Anyway, thanks for the pictures. I grew up in Ohio, but I've been in the late, formerly great state of California ever since getting out of the military.

As a boy I spent many cold fall mornings in the cornfields, pheasant hunting with my dad and his bird dog (English springer spaniel).

As a boy I would work field trials with my dad. My job was to lay out the pheasants next to bamboo stakes with a little ribbon, so the trainer knew where to direct the dog with whistle commands and hand signals. The dogs are very intelligent and will follow commands from a quarter mile away.

You can put a pheasant to sleep in about 5 seconds: tuck the head under the wing, rock it back and forth about 3 - 4 times, and lay it in the grass. The bird snoozes until the dog comes charging in and flushes it into the air.

Pheasants are like roadrunners, they'd rather run than fly, and they can out-run anyone. A trained dog is a necessity.

They lay their brown eggs right out in the open, in the fields. I don't know how they survive, but they do. Ohio has millions of pheasants.

Now that California is self-destructing I think more and more about moving back to Ohio.