PHEASANTS 279 



water, and it should be boiled water given cold. It is not 

 possible to leave water in the pans and prevent the young birds 

 drinking it, so that every precaution has to be taken that the 

 water does not introduce disease. But the chicks will not 

 require much other liquid than that contained in their cooked 

 food. A large proportion of the food given after the first 

 fortnight should be green vegetable, given cooked or raw, 

 according to the quality, or both, according to the appreciation 

 of it by the birds. Green food and insects are natural pheasant 

 foods in the summer, when the birds are young, and there is no 

 reason why they should be deprived of one because they cannot 

 get the other. Enormous numbers of insects are always in 

 the trees of the coverts, and it was a habit of James Mayes, 

 when keeper to the late Maharajah Duleep Singh, to remove 

 his birds into covert the instant they began to look ill. He 

 told the author that he saved them by this means, and as 

 mature and immature insects drop in numbers from the trees 

 probably the change back to natural feeding recovered the lost 

 condition. 



Of course pheasants will eat ants' eggs greedily; they 

 would probably grow healthy and strong on this food alone, 

 just as partridges will. But the insects do not exist in sufficient 

 numbers to feed as many pheasants as are reared. Whether 

 some few ants' eggs might be safely given to pheasants the 

 author does not know, but partridges must either be wholly or 

 not at all fed upon them. The birds will not look at anything 

 else if they can get some ants' eggs, although the numbers are 

 not enough to keep them. It is usual to try to do without this 

 food, and only to employ it in case birds are off their feed and 

 require a " pick-me-up." Young sparrows will feed upon the 

 ants themselves, but small partridges only take the eggs. This 

 causes much more of the food to be required, and although it is 

 generally free food, the labour necessary to get enough makes 

 the free food very much the most expensive. 



The kind of pheasant pen required for the birds to winter 

 in is a large one the larger the better. The number of birds 

 wintering in it must be left to the judgment of the individual. 



