280 PHASIANID.E. 



To keep up a stock of Pheasants, several are kept all the 

 year in pens, where many eggs are produced, hut as tlie 

 females will seldom sit steadily in confinement, these eggs, 

 with others found by mowers, are hatched and reared by 

 common hens of small size, which are generally found to be 

 the best nurses. The young birds require to be carefully fed 

 with ants' eggs, grits, maggots of flesh-flies, &c. till they are 

 able to take coarser food, or old enough to go to stubble and 

 provide for themselves. 



The Pheasant, says Mr. Selby, " like most of the gallina- 

 ceous tribe, is very liable, especially in a state of confinement, 

 to a disease called the gapes, so destructive to broods of 

 chickens and young turkeys in particular situations. It is 

 occasioned by an intestinal worm of the genus Fasciola, 

 which, lodging in the trachea, adheres by a kind of sucker to 

 its internal membrane, and causes death by suffocation from 

 the inflamed state of the part. Many recipes for the cure of 

 this malady have been suggested, but none of them seem to 

 be effectual except the one recommended by Montagu, in the 

 Supplement to his Ornithological Dictionary, under the 

 article Pheasant, — namely, fumigation by tobacco, found to 

 be an inflillible specific when administered with due care and 

 attention." The young birds are put into a wooden box, into 

 which the fumes of tobacco are blown by means of a common 

 tobacco-pipe : any state short of suffocation by the remedy is 

 found to be a cure for the complaint. 



The food of Pheasants in a wild state consists of grain, 

 seeds, green leaves, and insects. I have several times seen 

 Pheasants pulling down ripe blackberries from a hedge side, 

 and later in the year have also seen them fly up into high 

 bushes to pick sloes and haws. Mr. Selby mentions he has 

 observed that the root of the bulbous crowfoot, Ranunculus 

 bulbosus, a common but acrid meadow plant, well known as 

 the buttercup, is particularly sought after by the Pheasant, 



