LAYING AND HATCHING. 65 
the earliest possible opportunity. We do not assert that those nuisances the rooks 
are dangerous in this stage of the pheasant breeding, although we should deem it 
imprudent to trust them too far; but there can be no doubt about the desires of 
that long-tailed hawk on the hover on the hill above, although, being a conspicuous 
enemy, the precautions taken against him have almost driven him to despair. And 
there a weasel is watching, popping his head at intervals out of different holes in 
the neighbouring bank, undeterred by the fate of several of his family, who have 
already been trapped there and gibbeted. But more dangerous than hawk or weasel 
are the jackdaws. For, as these vociferous birds bear comparatively respectable 
characters, they are more likely to be indulged with a licence they abuse. We know 
them to be, davards: we cannot deny the family tendency to kleptomania. But we 
are in the way of believing chattering to be the sign of a frank, shallow nature, 
and we are apt to condone the thefts that are perpetrated with no view to profit. 
In reality, the jackdaw is a deep hypocrite—a robber and a bloody-bexked murderer. 
He chatters his way from branch to branch above the coops with the most uncon- 
cerned air in the world—just as a human thief walks, whistling, with his hands in 
his pockets, towards the prey he means to make a snatch at. Then, when he sees 
himself unnoticed, the jackdaw stills his chatter and makes his stealthy swoop; and 
in this way, watching while your watcher’s back is turned, he massacres a whole 
family of your innocents, and the hawks and weasels get the credit of the crime. 
But, after all, a gun kept upon the spot generally inspires a salutary dread. Many 
of your young birds survive the perils of their cheeperhood; then the long grass in 
the neighbouring bits of covert becomes alive with them, and once in that stage 
they are comparatively safe. Thenceforward till the autumn they feed and thrive, 
strengthen and fatten. And sport, sale, and the autumn game course out of the 
question, what can be pleasanter or prettier in the way of sounds or sights than the 
young birds learning to crow in your coverts as you saunter out before breakfast, or 
scattered about your lawn as you dine with open windows of a summer evening; 
Pace Mr. Tegetmeier, and other gallinaceous authorities, we must say that in the 
way of pets we prefer pheasants to poultry.” 
Many pheasant rearers are so short-sighted as to recruit their stock of eggs 
by purchase, forgetting that in the great majority of cases these eggs are stolen 
either from their own or from other preserves. In some cases the keepers 
themselves purloin the eggs and sell them to the dealers, from whom they are 
perhaps repurchased by the owner of the very estate frem whence they were 
abstracted. As an example of the mode in which these frauds are perpetrated, I 
may adduce the following example, furnished by a correspondent:—<On a small 
estate in Sussex there was a pheasantry with about seventy-five birds, and when the 
laying commenced the eggs were taken up carefully two or three times a day; the 
keeper had these eggs out as he got the hens ready to sit, which was three or four 
K 
