Major Maurice Portal—-Chukor Partridges from Crete 119


five of them and replaced them with dummy eggs. The hen came and

looked and called the cock from the end of the garden and the pair

went straight away together and scraped a hole under a plant of

brussel-sprouts, 50 yards off, putting in only a few bits of dead weed,

and laid one egg the same day. I took the other five of the first nest.

She laid fourteen eggs in the second nest, which was deep and eggs

were piled on each other. I removed the top four with a spoon, but

the hen came and looked, and again called the cock, and went off.

That afternoon it was cold and dull and they came into the potting-

shed and made a scrape in the soil by the gardener’s feet as he worked,

and laid one egg in it under the potting-bench. They had for the first

time suddenly shown a fondness for seed-beds, and had cleared a bed

of seedling lettuce, onions, and something else, so I roughly enclosed

some grass outside where the bee-hives were, and the gardener opened

the garden door and they went to their new home. A few days later

a new nest was made under a dock, and finally fifteen eggs were laid.

Incubation commenced about 23rd May, and twelve hatched about

6th June. The enclosure was suitable owing to ants’ nests and shelter

from a wall, so the gardener only fed on seeds and gave water. The

young were always bad to see and worse to catch, as, if frightened at all,

they squatted and did not move a fraction. The cock always seemed

to be with them, except once when both were with them on the border.

The cock was chiefly noticed on the nest during incubation, but we

never went oftener than once a day. I had to go to London on business

on 5th July, whien the chicks were three weeks old, and returned on

9th July to see ten flying some 200 yards in a flight and over garden

walls and tree-tops.


Haines, the gardener, to whom all credit of success is due, as he has

had sole care of them, informed me that on 6th July he had gone to

look at a hive of bees and saw the hen Chukor with seven or eight young

not two days old. I regret I cannot be positive that I saw her oil the

nest which hatched the twelve, and can only assume that the cock

did nearly all the incubation, and the hen started a new and fourth

nest, which up to date I have not found in the grass, so I do not know

how many eggs she laid in it. The ten young alive of the third nest

are always with the cock, and he keeps them away from the hen and



