FORMATION OF COVERTS. 81 
essential service to me in a night excursion after poachers. If there be no party 
wall, an eye ought to be kept from time to time on the neighbouring hedges. 
Poachers are apt to set horsehair snares in them; and these villanous nooses give 
the pheasants apoplexy. Six or seven dozen of wooden pheasants, nailed on the 
branches of trees in the surrounding woods, cause unutterable vexation and loss of 
ammunition to these amateurs of nocturnal plunder. Small clumps of hollies and 
yew trees, with holly hedges round them, are of infinite service, when planted at 
intervals of one hundred and fifty yards. To these the pheasants fly on the sudden 
approach of danger during the day, and skulk there till the alarm is over.” 
It is sometimes desirable to supply temporarily the want of ground covert for 
young birds in fir plantations where there is only short grass. The readiest mode 
of doing this is to use the trimmings of hedges, tops of trees, and boughs; and if fir 
plantations are numerous there is little trouble in getting plenty of tops of trees, 
these should be cut about a yard long and stuck in holes made with a crowbar, 
in clumps, leaving room between each for a beater to walk. The high grass soon 
grows in amongst the sticks, and makes very good ground covert, which will last 
some years; or the roots of young spruce trees may be bared on one side and cut, 
when the trees may be pulled down into a nearly horizontal position, and kept 
so by filling up the hole with the earth dug out. 
The vignette at the end of this chapter represents the head of a hen pheasant 
with a singularly deformed beak, the upper mandible having passed between the 
sides of the lower jaw. The bird was found dead, in a very emaciated state. 
