Skyrim has plenty of oddities. There's the goldfish memory of your enemies, the way you can get good enough at pickpocketing to literally steal the shirt off someone's back, and how it's possible for NPCs to attain a level of narrative importance sufficient to ward off death. But those are nothings. Trifles. Mere bagatelles compared to the game's most major inconsistency: The pheasants.
Think about it. Pheasants are all over the place in Skyrim, but only ever as corpses. They hang in kitchens and linger in food halls, but you can count the number of living ones you see on no hands at all. Are we to believe that the denizens of Skyrim, like the hunters of the Dodo, reduced the region's pheasant population to a set of cold bodies and warm memories? How long have they been gone? Are those corpses you can take giblets from decaying by the time the game takes place?
