There are many oddities in Skyrim. You can remember your enemies like a goldfish, you can be so good at pickpocketing that you literally steal the shirt off someone's back, or you can gain enough narrative importance to allow an NPC to escape death. But those things are nothing. They are trivial. They are mere bagatelle compared to the game's greatest contradiction: the pheasant.

Think about it. Pheasants are everywhere in Skyrim, but they appear only as corpses. They hang in kitchens and linger in food halls, but there are only so many pheasants alive that you can count them on two hands. Have the inhabitants of Skyrim, like the dodo hunters, reduced the pheasant population in the area to nothing but cold corpses and warm memories? How long have they been gone?" By the time the game is set, will the corpses that can be gutted be decomposing?

To put these unpleasant thoughts out of their minds, the modders of Skyrim are here again to defend logic and save the day: the mod "Ring-necked Pheasants - Mihail Monsters and Animals" has taken the humble pheasant back to their natural home: not the larder, but the wilds of Skyrim.

The creators, MihailMods, are also serious about their craft. Their mods "respect the pillars of lore and are implemented in an immersive and unique way," they say, and "instead of reusing 100% vanilla mechanics and just shamelessly throwing models and textures into the game, Mihail creates creatures that are unique and extreme in their idealization and implementation with enthusiasm, and offer an experience unprecedented in this field," he emphasizes. Stick it in your pipe and smoke it.

It's honestly wonderful. The authors are clearly ornithological artists of some sort, and the pheasants they rendered for "Skyrim" (including the old Legendary Edition) are frankly gorgeous. They strut, they menace, and the dusk sunlight seems to dance on their iridescent feathers, as if they were dancing on a pool of clear water. They even make a pheasant-like cry.

In other words, compare the stock (dead) birds of the game with MihailMods' version below. It is no match.

Don't worry, you can replace the regular dead pheasants with the MihailMods version using another mod.

You may think I'm teasing, but I'm not; the birds in MihailMod are truly exquisitely rendered, and you'll never be able to play Skyrim again without the odd flaw of no live pheasants. Mods like this are tiny and super-special, fixing problems that only a small percentage of players may have, and may really be my favorite kind. If you need more bird variation in your Skyrim play, just add the chick and chicken variation mods by the same author.