372 THE PHEASANT. 



preferred by the pheasants for their roosting-place ; and it is quite 

 impossible that the poachers can shoot them in these trees. More- 

 over, magpies and jays will always resort to them at nightfall ; and 

 they never fail to give the alarm on the first appearance of an enemy. 

 Many a time has the magpie been of essential service to me in a 

 night excursion after poachers. If there be no park wall, an eye 

 ought to be kept from time to time on the neighbouring hedges. 

 Poachers are apt to set horse-hair snares in them ; and these 

 villainous nooses give the pheasants apoplexy. Six or seven dozen 

 of wooden pheasants, nailed on the branches of trees in the sur- 

 rounding woods, cause unutterable vexation and loss of ammunition 

 to these amateurs of nocturnal plunder. Small clumps of hollies, 

 and yew trees with holly hedges round them, are of infinite service 

 when planted at intervals of 150 yards. To these the pheasants 

 fly, on the sudden approach of danger during the day, and skulk 

 there till the alarm is over. When incubation is going on, the 

 diurnal poachers make great havoc among the pheasants' eggs. 

 They sell sittings of them for five shillings (and sometimes for ten, 

 if the risk in procuring them is great), to gentlemen in towns, who 

 place them under bantam hens. If to these arrangements for pro- 

 tecting pheasants there could be added a park wall from nine to 

 ten feet high, and including about 250 acres, consisting of wood, 

 meadow, pasture, and arable land, the naturalist might put all 

 enemies at defiance, and revel in the enchanting scene afforded by 

 the different evolutions of single pairs, and congregated groups of 

 animated nature. Unmolested by packs of hounds, unbroken in 

 upon by idle boys, and unannoyed by stray cattle, and by those 

 going in search of them, his wild fowl would never desert the pool 

 till the day of their migration arrived ; and his pheasants (except for 

 the purpose of incubation, and then in no great quantities) would 

 seldom rove beyond the protected enclosure. The teal and widgeons 

 stay with me till the last week in April, long after the pochards and 

 the main flocks of malards have winged their flight to northern polar 

 regions ; and a white male pheasant has taken up his abode here 

 for seven years, without having been once seen to wander half a 

 mile from the house. 



Birds thus protected have very different habits from those which 



