Gervase Phinn: Getting the bird

They disappear at night but return the next day for breakfast, watched hungrily by a tree full of blackbirds and starlings.

Each time I see a pheasant I think of the "incident" when I was in my first week as a school inspector in North Yorkshire. It was a glorious drive from Settle to York.

The sun was shining and cloud shadows chased across the undulating green of the Dales. A magpie strutted along a silvered white stone wall and a pigeon flapped across the road just in front of the car. A fox appeared, stepping delicately across the road ahead of me, his brush down and snout up, unafraid, unconcerned. In the fields the sheep grazed lazily; lambs would start to arrive in a month or so. This surely was the best of seasons. Suddenly a large hen pheasant shot straight out in front of the car and I heard a thud as it hit the bumper. I quickly pulled over and jumped from the vehicle to see its prone body in the middle of the road, eyes closed and legs sticking skywards. All around me was silent and still. Not a person to be seen.

I picked up the bird, popped it in the boot of my car and thought of the wonderful roast game I would be having for my Sunday lunch.

At 4.30 that afternoon I arrived at the York Teachers' Centre where I was to direct a creative course for teachers. I opened the boot of the car to take the books and equipment into the centre – only to find everything a complete jumble. In the very middle of the mess crouched the pheasant I had run over and had assumed was dead. It was, to my amazement, very much alive and kicking.

The teachers began arriving for the course just in time to see something squawking and pecking and fluttering its wings madly. I had stunned the creature, not killed it; now fully recovered, it was not at all pleased to have been incarcerated in the cramped dark boot of a car for a couple of hours, bumping along mile after mile.

'Shoo!' I cried, trying to encourage the bird to leave the boot, but every time my hand came within pecking range it lunged at me. 'Shoo! Shoo!' I exclaimed again. Then, turning, I realised I had attracted a crowd of interested teachers who stood in a half circle watching proceedings.

"Is it a visual aid?" asked one teacher mischievously.

"No, it is not!" I snapped.

"Are we going to write bird poems," asked another teacher chuckling, "from first-hand experience?"

"No, we are not!" came my angry reply.

"You'd have been better off with a stuffed one," ventured another.

"Well, I don't want it in the centre," said the caretaker who had arrived, jangling his keys and shaking his head. "I'm not cleaning up after that."

"It's not going in the centre," I said, as flustered as the bird, which made another loud, plaintive squawk and beat its wings and thrashed its tail.

Eventually the bird flapped forward and took off, landing on the enclosing wall. Then, with tail proudly stuck up in the air, it strutted off towards York Minster.

YP MAG 20/11/10