370 THE SENSE OF SMELL IN BIRDS. 



adapted to proving- the sense of smell, acting under the same circum- 

 stances as among pheasants and partridges. 



1 come now to observations proving that smell as well as sight serves 

 to direct birds to their food, and I shall limit myself to those in which 

 this inference is least liable to error. 



Pheasants go for breeding to the woods of the Plaine-Basse, which 

 continue the forest of the Lvs ^ toward Gouvieux. These woods are 

 separated from mv place 1)V worked fields about a hundred yards wide. 

 I had never known the setting birds to cross the little phdn and come 

 tc my place when they left the nest for food, until some years ago, 

 when, liaving made a little basin where birds could drink in sunnner, 

 the gardener told me, a few days after, that the pheasants were coming 

 every day to drink at this basin in the interior of the park, nearly 

 90 yards from the ([uickset hedge shutting us off from the farm land 

 between us and the woods. 



Had they found the water by chance? Possibly; yet it was difficult 

 to imagine that the setting birds, who usually quit the nest only just 

 long enough to take their food, had come so far for nothing. The 

 following 3'ear I wished to make sure about the matter and used the 

 following simple plan: When the setting season canu^, I let the basin 

 drain, and had all the graveled walks around it carefully raked, so 

 that the claws of the birds should leave easily visible traces. For a 

 fortnight no pheasant came. 



It was the second week of May. The weather was div and tine, and 

 the wind was from the north. I had the basin tilled with water, and 

 the next day but one I found that a pheasant had come in a direct line 

 to drink, and had returned l)y the same route. There could be no 

 dou])t about its sex, which was shown by the droppings close to the basin 

 in the form that setting birds, especially among the gallinaceae, produce 

 so copiously on rising from the nest. 



It is incontestible that this pheasant, like all the pheasants, male and 

 female, which I have seen, discover water put in no matter how hidden 

 a place; had perceived its emanations at a distance of at least 200 yards, 

 even supposing her nest were on the verj^ border of the wood. 



In order to show that, in the observation which I am now to record, 

 sight could not have played anj^ part, I will begin with describing the 

 place where it was made. 



In the midst of a great lawn surrounded b}- wooded parts which 

 make a thick screen on the side of the tilled fields, there is a thicket of 

 lilacs mixed in with Austrian black pines and with pitch pines (ejnce'as). 

 In the center of this thicket there is a little open place, and it was 

 there that, in the hard Avinter of 1890-91, 1 chose a spot, well sheltered 

 by the evergreens from snow squalls, to scatter wheat and other grain, 

 which was at once appreciated b)^ the feathered tribe, who were able 



^ A river of Flanders, rising in Picardy. — Tkaxslator. 



