542 



THE COMMON PHEASANT. 



coloured eggs. The young are hatched in June or July, and 

 continue with the hen till they begin to moult in September. ; 

 The young males, only known by their shorter spur. Some- 

 times two males will contend for mastery until one is killed, or 

 both are caught. In 1856 I got a beautiful light cream- 

 coloured cock from Cambo gamekeeper, which I stuffed. It 

 was so keenly fighting with one of the usual colour that he 

 caught both. In 1857 I got another cock from a friend, also 

 caught fighting at Stravithie ; so keenly were they engaged that 

 his dog pulled out its tail ; the other flew away. Strange the 

 difference sexual intercourse makes. A few weeks before, the 

 same cocks would be shunning the hens, and as brothers 

 associating together, yet, at Nature's call for the continuation of 

 kind, friends are turned into enemies and deadly combat reigns. 

 Nor of this all-pervading feeling is humanity free. After the 

 breeding season, Cambo gamekeeper told me that five guns in 

 one day shot 120 cocks, but no hens ; so it seems the cocks can 

 be spared. War does the same — see the battlefield ! — unless 

 manhood-mania reaches woman. In 1858 I got a nest with 

 fourteen eggs lying quite open under the summer-house in 

 Spalding garden, another with twelve at the foot of a Scotch 

 fir in Stravithie, also quite open ; and to show there is no 

 particular nesting place, when felling trees on the Duke of 

 Koxburghe's estate at Floors Castle in 1894, a hen flew off a 

 spruce fir, when the tree fell, her seven eggs fell, two of which 

 were broken ; the nest was eighteen feet up. In 1878 Gilston 

 gamekeeper showed me twelve pens filled with young pheasants, 

 hatched by barnyard hens confined in cribs. The young 

 pheasants crept out and in by the spars. The reason of their 

 confinement was, he allowed a Cochin China hen to go about 

 with her brood of thirteen, but in the wood close to his house a 

 weasel killed every one in half an hour, and left them all lying 

 — as if bent on having a stock. He told me that pheasants, 

 grouse, partridges, black cock, &c, give no scent when sitting. 

 He often came across them sitting, his dogs going close past, 

 neither set nor drew — the same dogs never missing the scent of 

 other birds not on the nest. He said young fawns are protected 

 the same way. He once saw two little roe-deer fawns crouching 

 close within a few feet of him ; his old, keen-scented Scotch 

 terrier beside him never knew they were there — " a dog," he 

 said, " that would follow the scent of deer for twenty miles 

 rather than be beat" — a proof the young have no scent, nor 

 hen birds incubating. He showed me a dead young pheasant. 



