Chukar Partridge

I am a bird watcher. I have been known to almost wreck the car craning my neck to check out some flying creature or other. I watch for the pelicans that migrate here for the summer, notice the Blue Herons that move back and forth over the city, listen and watch the nesting pair of Redtails in the cottonwood trees across the street. We have two bird feeders in the front of our place and have had gold finches, house finches, sparrows, chickadees, doves and an albino pigeon feeding there. Today,. however, we found a new bird. Then, we found a whole flock of the new birds.

 Chukar Partridge

There was a flock of eight or so birds hanging out at our condo complex this morning as I was leaving to take T to school. They are native to Afganistan and Nepal, but are raised domestically for bird dog trials (according to a friend of J's who has bird dogs). She suggested they have probably escaped from a breeder and are worth $10 a piece if T wanted to catch them. J and I think that if he were to catch them it would be to make pets of them, instead of turning them over to hunters to kill. 

There are some areas, like the Western slope of Colorado, where there are feral flocks of these particular birds, but not on the Front Range. I don't have a bird book where I record what I see, like some bird watchers, but I still make a note when I see something I haven't seen before.