Deceased ???, Skagit Flats, WA (1 Viewer)

I found some dead birds, possibly poached, and I wanted to have better information to provide the officials. I imagine the species in question will influence whether they dispatch a unit to investigate. The bird(s) in question were dumped in a drainage ditch adjacent to some hunting and some restricted areas in Western Washington State, USA.

The first is the wide shot that may likely be too wide to make anything from. I only thought to take a single shot of one of them, assuming they were all the same, but unknown. There's a beer bottle and some apples in there for scale, but each bird was maybe the size of a small hawk or large-ish falcon. Perhaps I was fixated on raptors because we had met a hunter earlier that day that said some of the hunters get pissy about the raptors because they might steal a slain bird before the hunter has a chance to retrieve it.

Can't figure the first picture, but the second shows a bedraggled cock Common Pheasant.

Peter

That's unfortunate. It's even in season. Guess some jerk wasn't happy with his specimen and threw it in the water so he could keep hunting for a "better one" and ignore the legal limit.

Or it just died

If what I'm seeing there are the wings/backs of at least two other birds, I would assume not, but maybe. Can't rule it out.

I think I see four corpses. I recognize the pheasant at lower left, but have no clue about the others other than they're mostly dark and they're of similar size to the pheasant. The odds of all four drowning together, or dying of exhaustion and dropping into the ditch together, are beyond minuscule.

Reasonable guess is that a hunter changed his mind about bringing these home. Given the other trash in the ditch, I'm guessing this is a roadside ditch, so these were dumped just prior to getting into the truck, or possibly after beginning the drive home. Strange behavior, unless I resort to less-reasonable guesses: a truckful of illegal catch, a roadblock farther up the road, and this guy getting a warning via cell phone.

nartreb said:

I think I see four corpses. . .. Strange behavior, unless I resort to less-reasonable guesses: a truckful of illegal catch, a roadblock farther up the road, and this guy getting a warning via cell phone.

Click to expand...

Works for me! By far the most esthetically satisfying of the 2 scenarios. . ..