12 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PHEASANTS. 
March, as they sit twenty-five days, and they do not very often lay (only every 
other day, at least at the commencement). Other cases earlier by three or four 
days than this instance have been recorded. The Rev. G. C. Green, of Modbury, 
Devon, writes: “On Sunday, April 18, 1875, as my curate was returning from 
taking the duty in a neighbouring church, a hen pheasant started from the roadside 
hedge close to the town, and fluttered before him. While watching her movements 
he saw eleven young pheasants, apparently newly hatched, fluttering in the hedge, 
and at the edge of a pond close by. They soon scrambled into some cover, and the 
mother bird flew. off. to rejoin them from another quarter. I understand, from 
inquiry, that this is not a solitary instance of such an early brood of pheasants in 
South Devon.” : 
On the other hand, examples of nests deferred until very late in the year are 
not unknown. Mr. W. W. Blest, of Biddenden, near Staplehurst, writes: “ Whilst 
partridge shooting on the 3rd of September, 1874, we disturbed a sitting pheasant, 
the nest containing twelve eggs. We often hear of the early nesting of game birds, 
but rarely so late in the season.” In October, 1869, Mr. Walter R. Tyrell, of 
Plashwood, near Stowmarket, forwarded to me a young pheasant, with the following 
letter : “‘ When pheasant shooting with some friends yesterday, the 15th inst., in this 
neighbourhood, one of the beaters picked up dead, in a path in the wood we were 
in, a very young chick pheasant; it could not have been hatched more than a week. 
My keeper tells me he has found them (but very rarely) as young in September. 
I forward the young chick to your office, in order that you may inspect it.” I 
carefully examined the young bird, which was not more than two or three days 
old. These late-hatched birds were in all probability the produce of the second laying 
during the same season. 
The artificial state in which these birds exist, as supplied with nutritive food 
and protected in our coverts and preserves, leads to other departures from their 
natural conditions. Thus variations of plumage and size are much more frequent 
and more marked than would occur in the case of birds in a perfectly wild state. 
In some instances the size is very greatly increased. Hen pheasants usually weigh 
from two pounds to two pounds and a quarter, whilst the usual weight of cock 
pheasants is from about three pounds to three pounds and a half, but Mr. Yarrell, 
in his “History of British Birds,’ mentions two unusually large; he says “The 
lighter bird of the two just turned the scale against four and a half pounds; the 
other took the scale down at once. The weights were accurately ascertained, in the 
presence of several friends, to decide a wager of which I was myself the loser.” 
One of five pounds and half an ounce was sent me by Mr. Carr, of the Strand, 
this was a last year’s bird of the common species. And in 1859 one bird, of the 
enormous weight of five pounds and three quarters, was sent by Mr. Akroyd, of 
Boddington Park, Nantwich, to Mr. Shaw, of Shrewsbury, for preservation. Mr. 
