104 REARED PHEASANTS 



where they perch or roost at night on trees, especially on the spread- 

 ing, horizontally disposed branches of the larch and spruce, tall 

 holly- trees being esteemed places of refuge. When hard pressed 

 pheasants will visit the poultry yard in quest of food, but this is 

 generally provided against by keepers placing sheaves of corn 

 in woods for the use of the pheasants in winter, and known as 

 " pheasant-feeds," without which it is questionable if pheasants 

 would survive wild in Britain. These " pheasant-feeds," besides 

 enabling pheasants to pass safely over the winter months, encourage 

 flocks of wood pigeons, and though many fall to the keeper's, gun, 

 even as many as twenty-six birds on a " train " at a shot, numbers 

 are left to devastate young clover, upon which they mainly 

 subsist, and outstanding tops of turnip and swede crops, as soon 

 as the overlying snow is melted away. From the woods wild 

 pheasants disperse to the outskirts and even hedgerows for nesting 

 in the spring, and are particularly fond of low bushes with long grass 

 at the base, as occurs in young plantations and ornamental coverts, 

 where dry ground obtains with the needful shelter and seclusion 

 for incubation, and also in front or near by open spaces of compara- 

 tively short grass and leguminous herbage, upon which the young 

 pheasants may forage and therein find the insect food, such as 

 so-called ant-eggs (pupae), they require. Sometimes the pheasant 

 even where no rearing is practised, the preserving being restricted 

 to preventing poaching, keeping down vermin, and feeding in winter 

 will interbreed with the common fowl, the hybrid produced by the 

 union of the cock-pheasant with the common hen being termed a Pero. 

 The pheasant will also interbreed with the Guinea-fowl, and even 

 with the black grouse. When old the female pheasants may assume 

 the general feathers and plumage of the males, and the recorded 

 cases of " cock's eggs " may be explained as the occasional produce 

 of these aged females. There are white and pied varieties of the 

 common pheasant, but these seem never to be propagated. The 

 Ring-necked Pheasant, so named from the presence of a white ring 

 round its neck, is supposed to be hybrid, resulting from the breed- 

 ing of the common pheasant with the Chinese (Phasianus torquatus}. 

 The Gold Pheasant (P. pictus) of China is a beautiful species, coloured 

 scarlet, blue, and yellow, and with a brilliant erectable crest borne 

 on the head. The Silver Chinese Pheasant (P. nycthemerus) pos- 

 sesses a general white plumage, the feathers being marked by fine 

 black lines, and the under-parts are coloured black. 



REARED PHEASANTS is a term applied to those brought up 

 by hand. The eggs are collected as laid by the female pheasants, 

 kept in wire-netted enclosures along with a suitable proportion of 

 male birds, and also from nests outside, while many eggs are pur- 

 chased from pheasant-farm proprietors or dealers. The eggs are 

 incubated by domestic fowls, popularly known as " clucking " 

 hens, and after hatching out the pheasants are fostered by the hens 



