3 1 2 Habits of the Pheasant. 



must be something radically wrong in the game laws. How 

 or when those laws are to be amended, is an affair of the 

 legislature. The ornithologist can do no more than point 

 out the grievance which they inflict upon society, and hope 

 that there will soon be a change in them for the better. But 

 to the point. Food and a quiet retreat are the two best 

 offers that man can make to the feathered race, to induce them 

 to take up their abode on his domain ; and they are abso- 

 lutely necessary to the successful propagation of the pheasant. 

 This bird has a capacious stomach, and requires much nutri- 

 ment ; while its timidity soon causes it to abandon those places 

 which are disturbed. It is fond of acorns, beech mast, the 

 berries of the hawthorn, the seeds of the wild rose, and the 

 tubers of the Jerusalem artichoke. As long as these, and the 

 corn dropped in the harvest, can be procured, the pheasant 

 will do very well. In the spring, it finds abundance of nourish- 

 ment in the sprouting leaves of young clover ; but, from the 

 commencement of the new year till the vernal period, their 

 wild food affords a very scanty supply ; and the bird will be 

 exposed to all the evils of the vagrant act, unless you can 

 contrive to keep it at home by an artificial supply of food. 

 Boiled potatoes (which the pheasant prefers much to those 

 in the raw state) and beans are, perhaps, the two most 

 nourishing things that can be offered in the depth of winter. 

 Beans, in the end, are cheaper than all the smaller kinds of 

 grain; because the little birds, which usually swarm at the place 

 where pheasants are fed, cannot swallow them ; and, if you 

 conceal the beans under yew or holly bushes, or under the 

 lower branches of the spruce fir tree, they will be out of the 

 way of the rooks and ringdoves. About two roods of the 

 thousand-headed cabbage are a most valuable acquisition 

 to the pheasant preserve. You sow a few ounces of seed in 

 April, and transplant the young plants, two feet asunder, in the 

 month of June. By the time that the harvest is all in, these 

 cabbages will afford a most excellent aliment to the phea- 

 sants, and are particularly serviceable when the ground is 

 deeply covered with snow. I often think that pheasants are 

 unintentionally destroyed by farmers during the autumnal 

 seedtime. They have a custom of steeping the wheat in 

 arsenic water. This must be injurious to birds which pick up 

 the corn remaining on the surface of the mould. I some- 

 times find pheasants, at this period, dead in the plantations, 

 and now and then take them up, weak and languid, and 

 quite unable to fly. 



I will mention, here, a little robbery by the pheasants, 

 which has entirely deprived me of a gratification 1 used for- 



