30 MANAGEMENT OF PHEASANTS IN PRESERVES. 
Hall :—“ This bird has a capacious stomach, and requires much nutriment, while 
its timidity soon causes it to abandon those places which are disturbed. It is fond 
of acorns, beech mast, the berries of the hawthorn, the seeds of the wild rose, and 
the tubers of the Jerusalem artichoke. As long as these, and the corn dropped 
in the harvest, can be procured, the pheasant will do very well. In the spring 
it finds abundance of nourishment in the sprouting leaves of young clover; but 
from the commencement of the new year till the vernal period, their wild food 
affords a very scanty supply, and the bird will be exposed to all the evils of the 
Vagrant Act, unless you can contrive to keep it at home by an artificial supply of 
food. Boiled potatoes (which the pheasant prefers much to those in the raw state) 
and beans are, perhaps, the two most nourishing things that can be offered in the 
depth of winter. Beans in the end are cheaper than all the smaller kinds of grain, 
because the little birds, which usually swarm at the place where pheasants are fed, 
cannot swallow them; and, if you conceal the beans under yew or holly bushes, or 
under the lower branches of the spruce fir tree, they will be out of the way of the 
rooks and ringdoves. About two roods of the thousand-headed cabbage are a most 
valuable acquisition to the pheasant preserve. You sow a few ounces of seed in 
April, and transplant the young plants 2ft. asunder, in the month of June. By 
the time that the harvest is all in, these cabbages will afford a most excellent 
aliment to the pheasant, and are particularly serviceable when the ground is deeply 
covered with snow. I often think that pheasants are unintentionally destroyed by 
farmers during the autumnal seed-time. They have a custom of steeping the wheat 
in arsenic water. This must be injurious to birds which pick up the corn remaining 
on the surface of the mould. I sometimes find pheasants, at this period, dead in 
the plantations, and now and then take them up weak and languid, and quite 
unable to fly. I will mention here a little robbery by the pheasants, which has 
entirely deprived me of a gratification I used formerly to experience in an evening’s 
saunter down the vale. They have completely exterminated the grasshoppers. For 
these last fourteen years I have not once heard the voice of this merry summer 
charmer in the party. In order to render useless all attempts of the nocturnal 
poacher to destroy the pheasants, it is absolutely necessary that a place of security 
should be formed. I know of no position more appropriate than a piece of level 
ground at the bottom of the hill, bordered by a gentle stream. About three acres 
of this, sowed with whins, and surrounded by a holly fence to keep the cattle out, 
would be the very thing. In the centre of it, for the space of one acre, there ought 
to be planted spruce fir trees, about 14ft. asunder. Next to the larch, this species 
of tree is generally preferred by the pheasants for their roosting-place; and it is 
quite impossible that the poachers can shoot them in these trees. Moreover magpies 
and jays will always resort to them at nightfall; and they never fail to give the 
alarm on the first appearance of an enemy. Many a time has the magpie been of 
