Maybe he prefers Roselle
Denise Dohe of Roselle had a tough time unloading a couple of wild houseguests this summer. Eighteen-year-old Dohe, a 1990 graduate of Lake Park High School, had invited the feather-brained pair for a couple of months` visit, but when the time came to shoo them off, one of them sat like a bump on a fence and refused to budge.
”We picked up the birds in May at this pheasant farm,” said Dohe.
”They were just two weeks old, like little chicks.” She kept them under a heat lamp in the basement at first and later in cages in the back yard. She fed them pheasant mash and cracked corn, but she didn`t try to tame them. ”My dad told me when I got them that as soon as the fair starts the birds will be released, because they`re wild birds. That was hard.”
Dohe belongs to the Roselle Go-Gettums 4-H and raised the baby pheasants as a 4-H project. After they won blue ribbons in the wildlife division at the Du Page County Fair, she took them to a 10-acre pheasant preserve at the Amoco Research Center in Naperville to release them.
”We released them, and the hen just took off,” said Dohe. ”It was like she knew what to do. But the cock-I tossed him in the air, and he just sat down on the fence next to us. There were all these people around, and he couldn`t care less. He sat there till we left, and later we could see him burrowing himself into the weeds.”
Breaking up is hard to do, but Dohe has an antidote to the empty nest syndrome: ”I`ll do it again, if my dad will let me.”
SOURCE: Betty Lundy.
Creatures great and small If you missed hearing Hinsdale poet Phyllis Janik read her works at the Printers` Row Book Fair in June, you can still catch her on Dial-A-Poem, Chicago! Monday through Sept. 9, sponsored by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. She will repeat her book fair hit ”Read My Hips,” a spoof of Bush-speak, and also read ”Squirrelhouse Blues,” a verse she has dedicated to ”anyone who has ever had to deal with tradespeople coming to the house.” ”We had this animal that got into an area of our house,” Janik said. ”It was the inspiration for that poem.” The squirrel gets the credit, but the way Janik tells it, demerits go to the people she called for help: exterminators I and II and a cement worker who dodged calls, missed appointments and finally took a pass on her problem. The last straw was the carpenter who assessed the situation and said, ”Lady, I can`t do this job; you need a stucco man.” And ”Squirrelhouse Blues” was born. Hear it by dialing 312-346-3478 anytime Monday through Sept. 9.
Betty Lundy.
