Ringneck Pheasants in My Office: Goodbye Sweet Sixteen!

"Well, according to this download from the internet,
we need to dunk their beaks in water if they are
hatched from an incubator."
Brenda and I leaned over the cardboard pen
in my office and stared at the two week old chicks.
"That sounds easy." She said.
After fifteen minutes of catching the tiny chicks
and dunking their heads in the water dispenser
we were satisfied they knew how to drink and
felt like accomplished pheasant mothers.
It was not easy! They were tiny,
but fast as greased lightning.
Six weeks later the phone rang
and Brenda asked me how our babies were.
"They are fine but I had to put a top on the pen
because they kept flying out to sit on the windowsill.
Now the odor in the room burns your eyes because
they grew so fast but when I try to clean the pen
they all fly out! Can you help me release them
to the yard tomorrow?"
Brenda stood in the middle of my backyard
where the pheasants were SUPPOSED to live happily ever after.
"Okay, when I slide them out of Milo's cat carrier
into the pen, you can put the top on the pen." I said.
Ugh. We stared up into the sky as the sixteen pheasants
shot straight up into the sky as if out of a cannon and
away into the wild blue yonder and I said,
"Goodbye sweet sixteen!"