92 PHEASANTS ADAPTED FOR THE COVERT. 
abnormal plumage, showed a decided relationship to the Ring-necked cross, by 
the white mark on either side of the neck”—a circumstance also noticed by 
Macgillivray. ; 
A purely white variety of the common pheasant occasionally occurs in 
the coverts without any apparent cause. A correspondent, who has been a 
pheasant rearer for thirty years, writes:—“Four years ago a nest of thirteen eggs 
was brought in by the mowers. All the eggs were hatched; eleven were perfectly 
white birds, the other two the common colour. Nine of the white birds were 
reared—six cocks and three hens; three cocks were turned out, the others were kept 
in the pheasantry, pinioned. The white pheasants proved very bad layers—very 
delicate, their eggs very bad; and those that were hatched very difficult to rear, and 
there never was a white bird bred. The extraordinary thing is, that where the nest 
‘was taken up the keepers had never before or since seen a white pheasant. The 
three cocks turned out never (to my knowledge or the keeper’s) were the cause of 
white pheasants or pied pheasants being bred, and the three all disappeared in the 
second year. On another part of my estate a white cock pheasant was bred; he 
was considered a sacred bird, and lived seven years, when he disappeared. In the 
covert he resorted to I killed one pied pheasant, and I believe that one bird was the 
only pied pheasant (if bred through him) that ever was seen.” By careful breeding 
there is no doubt that a permanent white race might be established if such a 
proceeding were thought desirable, which I much doubt, as white varieties are 
generally very deficient in hardihood. Left to themselves, the white cocks are 
doubtless driven away from the hens by the stronger and more vigorous dark birds, 
and rarely increase. their kind. When mated in pheasantries the natural colour has 
a strong tendency to reproduce itself, and white, or even pied or parti-coloured birds 
are not always to be produced from white parents, as the following letters will 
show :—*On the manor of a friend in Yorkshire are a cock and hen pheasant 
entirely and purely white. They inhabit different woods, and are strenuously 
protected by the head keeper, who considers their presence a proof of the integrity 
of his coverts, and invariably requests strangers to spare them. ‘There are also a 
few ring-necks in the coverts, which have bred so freely with the common sort 
that hardly a cock pheasant is killed but shows some marks of white about his 
neck, while pied birds are so rare that the few that have been shot have been 
preserved. If, then, white pheasants breeding with ring-necks and other birds 
produced, as a rule, pied birds, why should there not have been every year at 
least one brood of pied pheasants in these woods in the same proportion as the 
half-bred ring-necks?”’ Another correspondent writes:—‘‘.A white hen was confined 
in the pheasantry here for some years with a common pheasant, but of the progeny 
there was not one pied bird. A pied cock was then confined with a common hen 
pheasant, and there were a few of the chicks pied. Lastly, a pied cock and a pied 
