162 LIFE OF TEGETMEIER 



pheasants began to cause anxiety. At this time 

 he was inundated with specimens of dead 

 pheasant chicks, with requests to examine them 

 and report the cause of death and suggest a 

 remedy for the evil. It were hard to say how 

 many dissections he made while on the Field, 

 but for a long series of years Tegetmeier's reports 

 on the dead pheasants submitted to him might 

 almost be called a feature of the paper. 



He paid many visits to estates on which the 

 disease was rife, and eventually he came to the 

 conclusion that it was chiefly due to the over- 

 stocking which had grown up as a direct result of 

 the craze for heavy bags of birds. Landowners 

 and gamekeepers, without other thought than to 

 show a large head of pheasants in the shooting 

 season, had been rearing, or trying to rear far 

 more birds than their land could carry, and 

 the ground became " staled " to an extent which 

 made disease inevitable. One hears very much 

 less of these troubles with the young pheasants 

 nowadays ; and this, in the opinion of experts, 

 is due largely to the sustained campaign 

 Tegetmeier carried on against overstocking. One 

 cannot doubt that the great secret of his success 

 with birds, whether domestic or game, was his 

 resolute adherence to the principle that natural 

 methods should be followed as far as possible. 

 This principle underlay his teaching from the 

 beginning : it appears in his earliest book on 



