54 WILD LIFE: FURRED AND FEATHERED. 



In copses and spinneys the pheasant will be crowing and 

 strutting about, with ear-tufts erect, puffed-out crimson 

 cheek and burnished breast. He makes a brave picture, 

 both as he steps along so daintily, and also as he shoots 

 through the keen air of early spring, with his tail spread 

 out, its central feathers swaying, fully deserving his name 

 of rocketer nearly four miles at one flight he has been 

 known to take. The males are more than usually lively 

 during the month of March, as they now put on their war 

 paint in order to fight for the possession of the hen birds. 

 They are useful in eating up a great quantity of wire worms, 

 and other hurtful insects; later on they feed their young 

 on ants and their larvae. So do the partridges, which are 

 now pairing. And as the black ants (formica nigra) appear 

 first this month, I may be allowed to quote again from a 

 Son of the Marshes an interesting statement as to these 

 insects, as regards their furnishing food for the game birds 

 just mentioned 



" Two very different kinds of ant hills supply the eggs or 

 ant-pupse to the young of game birds, and of partridges in 

 particular. First, there are the common emmet heaps, or 

 ant hills, which are scattered all over the land. These the 

 birds scratch and break up, picking out the eggs as they 

 fall from the light soil of the heaps, . . . But the ant 

 eggs proper come from the nests or heaps of the great 

 wood ants, either the black or the red ants." 



The black appear in March, the red ones in April 

 commonly. These heaps of the black ant are mounds of 

 fir-needles, being in many instances as large at the bottom 

 in circumference as a waggon-wheel, and from two to three 

 feet in height even larger where they are very old ones. 

 They are found in fir woods, on the warm sunny slopes, 



