The snow globe had lost its fascination.

I looked outside at a world of cold and snow and more snow.

A single hen pheasant walked to my feeding station. She was brave and hungry. Maybe desperate would be a better description because she came close to humans. Pheasants don’t like people. People shoot them. It’s hard to like someone who shoots you. The winter can be hard on us all. The bird needed food. I hoped the corn that I had put out would say, “Come on in, the weather is fine.”

We mowed a lot of hay on the farm when I was a whippersnapper. We had cows to feed, and they ordered hay. I looked hard for nesting birds while I mowed the alfalfa. Pheasants and mallards were common nesters in the hay ground.

One day, I hit a nesting hen with the mower. The mower’s sharp sickles killed the hen quickly but spared the eggs. I felt terrible. I jumped from the tractor and grabbed the eggs hurriedly, emptying my lunch bucket to find room for the pheasant fruit and ran to our building site. I made haste to the henhouse. There I located a banty hen hunkered down in a nest. The banty hen was known for her urge to incubate. She would attempt to hatch golf balls, tennis balls and any kind of egg. Banties are the pitbulls of the poultry world. When I tried to gather an egg from under a banty hen, she’d peck me. It was a mean-spirited act intended to cause me to find eggs elsewhere.

I placed the orphaned pheasant eggs under the hen. The banty hen was good at her job and took the task seriously. She could focus. She hatched all the pheasant eggs and raised the chicks as her own. The young pheasants became teenagers, at least in behavior, before chickens would have. The chicks prospered but never warmed to people. They didn’t fly crazily around the henhouse at my appearance, but they remained wild birds. One by one, they wandered away from the friendly confines of our henhouse and returned to the wild. I hoped they would remember the little hen on Mother’s Day. The number of pheasants hanging out with the chickens was soon reduced to one — a rooster that refused to leave. He was like a drummer living in his parents’ basement. I named him Phil. Phil was a fighter. The banty roosters were renowned for their strutting and for their fighting ability. They would get up with the chickens and immediately look for a fight. The banty roosters found a fight in Phil. He was good. Phil used some sort of ancient Chinese pheasant martial arts practiced by only a select few. He took on all comers and defeated them all. The trouble with banty roosters is that they don’t know when they are licked. They kept coming back for more. The fights escalated to the point where the pheasant killed several of the banties.

Phil crowed a victorious “cow-cat” after each encounter.

“That pheasant has to go,” said my father. He looked at me and added, “I drew straws and you got the short one. Do something.”

My father was a dedicated carnivore. I could see a cartoon bubble over his head featuring a cooked Phil on the dinner table.

I couldn’t let that happen. I didn’t want to do Phil any harm. I was the one who put Phil into his predicament. He wasn’t cuddly or appreciative, but I liked Phil.

I took a cue from the banty hen and hatched a plan.

My alarm went off long before the dark of the night had begun to fade. I grabbed a gunnysack and made my way into the henhouse that was darker than the inside of a pants pocket. I employed a flashlight offering a flicker of light. Our flashlights were nothing more than storage units for dead batteries.

I located Phil. He was perched on the section of the roost that was considered prime real estate to fowl. I shined the light into Phil’s eyes. I grabbed his feet and moaned a bit at the sharpness of a spur. I apologized as I stuffed a struggling Phil into the gunnysack.

I placed Phil into my old Ford and hauled the kidnapped rooster pheasant many miles away. I waited until daybreak to release Phil because I did not want him to have to find his way in the dark.

I thought about Phil as I watched the hen swallow corn as quickly as possible at my feeder. I feel a bit guilty about the kidnapping.

I feed the pheasants every winter.

I do it for Phil.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.