10 NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PHEASANTS. 
of her eggs. Several examples of this occurrence are on record, but the following 
may suffice to prove that the circumstance is not so unfrequent as may have been 
supposed. One correspondent writes as follows: “‘Our head-keeper told me that one 
of his watchers had found a pheasant’s nest up a spruce fir tree. I was incredu- 
lous, so I went with him, and had the under-man there to show us. ‘The bird 
was sitting on the nest—an old squirrel’s. The man said she had twelve eggs. 
He also told us that he knew of another in a similar situation in the same 
plantation. The nest I saw was about twelve feet from the ground. The 
watchers found it in looking for nests of flying vermin, as some had escaped the 
traps.” 
‘Another states: “A keeper on the Culhorn estate, when on his rounds in 
search of vermin, observed a nest, which he took to be that of a hawk, on a Scotch 
fir tree, about fifteen feet from the ground. On throwing up a stone, out flew a 
fine hen pheasant. The keeper then ascended the tree, and found, to his astonish- 
ment, eight pheasants’ eggs in an old owl’s nest. He removed the eggs, and 
placed them under a hen, and at the expiration of three days he had eight fine 
lively pheasant birds.” 
A third states that “at Chaddlewood, near Plympton, Devon, a pheasant 
has built its nest (twelve feet from the ground) in the fork of an ash tree close 
to the house, and has now laid eight eggs.” 
Tt is difficult to ascertain whether or not in the instances in which the 
young are hatched in these elevated situations, they fall out of the nest and are 
killed and carried away by predatory animals, or whether they are safely removed 
by the parent birds, and if so, by what means; even the following accounts do 
not throw much light upon the subject. A correspondent of The Hield stated that 
“A hen pheasant made her nest in an oak tree, about nine feet from the ground. 
The young were hatched, and she succeeded in taking seven young ones safely to 
the ground, leaving five dead in the nest, and one bad egg.’ A second stated 
that in the park at Fillingham, Lincoln, a pheasant deposited eight eggs in the 
nest of a woodpigeon in a fir tree upwards of sixteen feet from the evound ; she 
hatched out seven of them, but was: unfortunate, as four were killed; they were 
supposed to have fallen from the nest. And a third reported that on the estate of 
the Marquis of Hertford, at Sudborne Hall, Suffolk, a pheasant had taken pos- 
session of a nest deserted by a sparrow-hawk, in a spruce fir, twenty-five feet 
from the ground, and hatched eight young ones, seven of which she succeeded in 
bringing safely down, but in what manner was not stated. 
Although as a rule the male pheasant takes no heed of the eggs laid by the 
female, or of the offspring when hatched, there are some well ascertained exceptions. 
Wild cock pheasants have been seen sitting in nests in the coverts by perfectly 
credible witnesses; and, although it has been suggested that the birds might have 
