Strange, but true: I saw movement at the woods’ edge, with flashes of tawny and red moving parts in the grasses. There was a liveliness there bigger than a basketball. My immediate thought was that a bobcat had one of our snowshoe hares by the bleeding neck.
I got downwind, slowly moved closer and put a big lens on the spot. In a minute, a head popped up – a beady-eyed head wearing bright red wattles on top of a neck of golden feathers. I had painstakingly stalked a rooster chasing bugs! On a hot day. In the open sun.
This trespasser apparently belonged to a neighbor who keeps chickens about a quarter of a mile down the road. The big rooster obviously was imbued with a sense of adventure and an expansive interpretation of “free range.”
I certainly don’t mind him eating “our” insects, but I hope he got back to his roost before dusk. He was in an area where coyotes and bobcats and, sometimes, bears roam, and eagles, hawks and owls fly. Nonetheless, he was a handsome devil, so I did his portrait as a memento to the joys of folly:
I also goggled his image and was told that he was a Buff Orpington rooster, a breed originally developed in the United Kingdom for their large size, tasty meat and good egg production. The report didn’t mention anything about them having a wanderlust trait.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on July 14, 2026.)