204 PHEASANTS 



In short, we have reduced the 1000 

 partridges, which was about the limit 

 the ground could produce, to about 800 ; 

 adding thereto some 500 pheasants in a 

 favourable year,^ with every hope that 

 the same season will not see a total 

 failure of both our game-bird crops. 



As to questions of board and lodging, 

 the latter consists of the natural roughness 

 already described, and a self-sown growth 

 of birch and bracken in the few planta- 

 tions, where the timber trees have all along 

 since been laid flat in some of the great 

 gales from which we periodically suffer. 



In the main they have to find their 

 own living, with an occasional sack of 

 refuse from the threshing -mill to keep 

 them from straying too far afield. They 

 are only regularly fed to collect them for 

 the shooting, without which precaution 

 the wild pheasant is apt to be absent 

 when most wanted. 



1 In this estimate the pheasant is considered as two- 

 thirds a competitor with the partridge living on the same 

 ground, and one-third an independent and non-conflicting 

 existence. 



