ix. PHEASANT REARING (PART VIII} 143 



in two or three beats, the birds will often slip away 

 right or left of the beaters, or will return from one 

 end of the wood to the other when forced to a corner, 

 and decline to break covert over the guns. 



8. With thick coverts of larch and spruce, without 

 open spaces. Pheasants rarely drive well out of these, 

 but will run to the ends en masse ; there will also be 

 no undergrowth to hold ground game. Avoid also a 

 wood composed entirely of beech (such as you may see 

 in Buckinghamshire). Bluebells and primroses are the 

 only undergrowth in a beech wood ; a pheasant can 

 usually run in a beech wood as easily as on a lawn, 

 and run he does, too, when he has such a good chance 

 of using his legs in preference to his wings. 



9. That contains, or is near, a large rookery. 

 Eooks play havoc with the eggs of game birds ; and 

 if these robbers exist in numbers they can almost 

 exterminate the partridges on an estate in the event 

 of a cold, late spring, when there is but a scanty 

 growth of herbage to conceal the nests and eggs. To 

 check the rooks from hunting a hedgerow for partridge 

 eggs, place rather conspicuously here and there in 

 hollows in the ground, to imitate nests, a dozen or so 

 small smooth pebbles from the seashore or the bank 

 of a river. I have seen a rook march up to one of 

 these artificial nests, hammer his beak against the 

 stones it contained, and then fly straight away as if 

 in disgust, though there was a real partridge nest 

 within a few yards of the bogus one. 



