STOCK 471 



a hen at her best, a half -spent cock with a hen already exhausted and 

 short of her stock of subcutaneous nesting fat to the extent of several 

 ounces. She has produced seven or eight eggs weighing an ounce apiece, 

 and she now produces half a dozen more. Not only are these six eggs 

 fewer in number than the first clutch, but they are almost certain to be 

 not all fertile. And what is even worse there is the male element to be 

 considered, and if, with the best possible materials in an unspent hen, his 

 second eifort at fertilisation is 60 per cent, less efficient than his first, 

 what will it be when he has to deal with the resources of a hen already 

 half exhausted ? 



The most certain way to avoid disease is to encourage the production 

 of strong, early, robust, well-grown and well-fed birds that can meet and 

 survive the privations of a hard winter, that can, if necessarj^, fiy far afield 

 for food, fight successfully, breed early, moult quickly, and put on new 

 feathers without a check and without exhaustion ; such birds, if they are 

 cocks, should weigh from 26 to 30 ounces, should have large red combs, full 

 voices, and thick white-stockinged feet and legs ; if they are hens they should 

 weigh up to 27 ounces, should moult rapidly and efiiciently almost in midwinter, 

 and after hatching out their broods should be fit to moult again without still 

 showing bare legs and weathered plumage in the shooting season. 



And the other side of the question: "cheepers" too small to rise twice 

 on August 12th, hardly three parts grown when the winter is upon them, bare- 

 legged, and with a scanty growth of feathers replacing the chicken .^cheep- 

 down, permanently undersized by the following spring, forced to mate '^''^•' 

 with equally undersized fellows on the lower and less healthy beats where 

 the food is soft and the water laden with the unwholesome washings of the 

 hills around ; beaten and often killed in their fights for the more desirable 

 mates, they are forced later on to be content with the undesirable. One can 

 imagine such a pair losing its first nest of eggs, and attempting a second. 

 The hen is already a confirmed "piner" exhausted by the production of 

 half a dozen eggs. If she attempts a second brood she is likely to succumb 

 to the intestinal parasites that infest her. At the best, she appears in the 

 August bag as a dull-feathered, shabby, undersized bird weighing 12 or 15 

 ounces instead of 22 or 24, or she is picked up dead with hundreds of others 

 in April and May as a " piner " which has never bred. 



This is no exaggerated picture of the life of more than half the birds 



