PHEASANTS 217 



who wish to stock new preserves. Where the birds are fed by 

 a keeper, as they must be when they are very numerous, they 

 become so tame that hunting them is not very exciting sport. 

 Some that have been released in this country, and have lived in 

 a natural state in places where shooting them was not allowed, 

 have become quite as tame as the birds in the English preserves. 

 Altogether the history of efforts to establish pheasants in a wild 

 state with a measure of protection from hunters shows that it 

 would often be practical for owners of woodland and waste land 

 to establish and preserve colonies of wild or half-wild pheasants. 

 Whether this will be done to any great extent depends upon the 

 extermination of wild animals and upon the placing of proper 

 restrictions upon the domestic animals (dogs and cats) which 

 are destructive to land birds ; it depends also, to some extent, 

 upon concert of action among the landowners in a community, 

 in securing for themselves the use of the pheasants grown on 

 their lands. 



The possibility of domesticating pheasants of the Manchurian 

 type, and one or two other rare varieties that, when seen on exhi- 

 bition, appear very docile, is also to be taken into account. The 

 United States Department of Agriculture 1 has called attention to 

 the fact that some of the little-known kinds of pheasants seem 

 especially adapted to domestication. Even before that, many 

 poultrymen, seeing these birds at exhibitions, had been im- 

 pressed by their appearance, and had remarked that they looked 

 like birds that would become thoroughly domestic. At the pres- 

 ent time persons desiring to grow any of the more common 

 varieties of pheasants for table use should first ascertain how 

 the game laws of the state in which they live, and of any state 

 into which they might want to send pheasants, would affect their 

 undertaking. Sometimes the laws made to protect pheasants in 

 a wild state have been passed without due regard for the interests 

 of persons growing them in captivity. Errors of this kind are 



1 Pheasant Raising in the United States, Farmers' Bulletin No. 390. 



