PHEASANTS 277 



greatly assist in the spread and increase of wild reared birds. 

 In the absence of any such sort, improvement only seems to be 

 possible by means of natural selection, or the survival of the 

 birds that do not get lost in the wet herbage, and in breeding 

 from them in preference to those that have been reared by hand. 

 But land varies so much, that large broods, say, at Euston in 

 Suffolk, would not prove that the same birds could have reared 

 a brood in the clays of Buckinghamshire or Middlesex. Sandy 

 soil is much the best for game, not only because water does not 

 stand on the soil, but because for some reason the vegetation 

 dries up so quickly after a wetting. It is not the wet that falls 

 on the chick's back that does the damage, but that which he 

 brushes from the grass as he walks through it. 



All questions of colour would have to give way before any 

 difference of habits that would make rearing easier than it is. 

 There is no reason why pheasants should cost more to rear 

 than wild ducks and farmyard chickens, except that they are 

 more delicate. Instead of being fed upon meal of kinds, they 

 have to be supplied with hard-boiled egg, new-milk custard 

 made with egg, or flesh, or blood, in their early stages. Bread- 

 crumbs supply all the early necessities of the barndoor fowl, 

 and the farther we go in pampering the farther we shall have 

 to go. The farm poultry in wild nature lived greatly upon 

 insects, just as the wild pheasant does now. It is to make up 

 for the absence of insects that so much nitrogenous food is 

 given to the pheasant chick, but as none is supplied to the 

 domestic poultry it appears likely that pheasants kept as 

 poultry are now reared would in a few generations become as 

 hardy and easy, because those that could not stand it would 

 die out. A race of pheasants entirely meal-fed would be of the 

 greatest possible value. 



Doubtless the losses at first would be heavy, for the pheasant 

 in nature lives neither on corn nor seeds in its early life. When 

 it is hatched in June, all the seeds of the previous year have 

 grown into plants, and none of that year's plants will have ripe 

 seeds for a month or more. So that when theorists tell game- 

 keepers that they should give canary seed, and thus return to 



