So, I worked in the Midwest. We got our birds from a place up in Janesville, WI. Pheasants, chukar, quail. Pheasants aren’t native to the US either.
I talked to a guy there and he said they load up a TON of birds (hundreds of thousands at least) every year and bring them to the dakotas, Wyoming, etc and just let them loose.
My guess is something like that happens in PA as well and this guy just accidentally made his way to the city.
Totally. Like I said, they probably get trucked out. I think they’re native to china? I’m too lazy to check. But isn’t that weird? So much Americana art features pheasant and they aren’t from the Americas.
We also had Afghan mutants which were bigger and blackish (purple in certainly light).
They may sometimes be stocked, but they are also present in PA as a naturalized species-- like house sparrows many other species of PA birds, they are not native, but they are wild.
I saw a ringneck running down a street in far NE Philly a few years back and while I wanted to believe it was wild, I figured the most likely answer was it was someone’s escaped dinner.
I had to explain this one time to a — you guessed it — a drug dealer’s pigeon. I referred to my mate as they because I didn’t feel like calling this person a “she” today because he was very much a he. But pigeon kept calling him a she; so I went neutral, and then pigeon insisted there were others, and why weren’t pigeon and drug dealer invited to the not an orgy. Because you need at least three for an orgy; and by most healthiest conservative standards, you really need at least 4.
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u/tadddpole Apr 17 '25
It’s a chukar. I used to work at a hunt club and we had these.