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My Favourite Fowl
By
Erin Maglaque
During some of the earliest summers I spent here in the northwest corner, I would walk barefoot, clad only in my bathing suit, down the small dirt road adjacent to my house. Padding down the street, cautious to not step onto the scorching pavement of my neighbors’ driveways, I would always stop and turn in the same place: halfway down, before the road faded into the clusters of trees, at a small clearing that looked out onto an overgrown meadow. Beyond the meadow was Bobby Wilbur’s pheasant farm.
The fine mesh nets covered every inch of the farm, preventing the perpetually squawking fowls from escaping. The entire hill facing the meadow was dirt, and across the reddish-brown
It was here that I would always stop, gaze across the meadow, and watch the little creatures cry out inarticulately. They seemed never to fly; to this day I don’t know whether or not pheasants have the ability to take wing. They simply walked their stuttering walk across the dirt, unaware that Bobby Wilbur was playing the role of God and determining how their future would be spent: lying in someone’s freezer.
The strange thing about the pheasant farm is that, although the birds were bred exclusively for food, I have never seen a person actually dine on pheasant meat. When I was very young, I once expressed to my mother my concern for the lack of business that Bobby Wilbur experienced; her rationalization was that pheasant meat simply wasn’t as popular as it once was.
For as long as I can remember, a neighboring fowl farm has caused extreme discomfort for all of those downwind. Strangely enough, the 'chicken’ farm (whose actual role was to raise chickens that produce eggs) was owned by Bobby’s cousin, Dave Wilbur. The Wilbur family, in terms of business operations, could not be more different. While Bobby’s farm is impeccable and smoothly run, his cousin’s is the most extreme opposite: the chickens are not allowed to see the light of day, their housing is literally falling apart, the chickens are underfed, and the fields are cluttered with countless shreds and scraps of junk. The poor maintenance and care for the chickens is made apparent every humid summer evening; when looking at your weathervane, it would be expected that your fingers are crossed : if you are downwind of Dave’s farm, 'Head for the hills!’ is the action recommended by the majority of the population of Sharon. Perhaps even worse is the weekly cleaning that occurs Saturdays; the amount of waste that is removed from those buildings is enough to make people change their town of residence. However, if it is allergy season, a brief period of exposure is likely to clear one’s sinuses.
So, which, the pheasant or the chicken, is my favorite fowl? In my experience, this is an impossible question to answer, for I am forever biased toward the farm management techniques of Bobby Wilbur.
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