88 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



always water to the depth of two or three feet. These swampy localities afford good 

 shelter. In the mornings and evenings the pheasants leave it for the more open and 

 dry country, where they pick up their food. I believe the same species is found on the 

 Hari-rud river, but I have seen no specimens from that locality." 



The Prince of Wales's Pheasant has been introduced successfully into England, 

 where it has done well both in the Zoo and in shooting preserves. In Tegetmeier's 

 " Pheasants," Colonel Sunderland tells of his experiences with this form. " I first tried 

 the importation of eggs, but they proved a dismal and costly failure. In the autumn of 

 1902 I went to the East, and succeeded in securing several birds. No one could 

 positively inform me whether this species of pheasant was polygamous or not, so I 

 brought to England an equal number of cocks and hens. A useless precaution, for the 

 cocks fought for the hens in the usual manner. The birds stood the long journey 

 very well, and were turned down into large enclosures in Hampshire at the end of 

 February, 1903. They did not begin to lay till the end of April, but laid very freely, 

 those in one pen averaging over thirty eggs a hen. Virtually all the eggs proved fertile. 

 They hatched extremely well, and the strong chicks proved fully as easy to rear as those 

 from the ordinary pheasant. They were fed on custard and oatmeal, etc., as recommended 

 by Tegetmeier. They were brought up in fields of standing corn and buckwheat, 

 surrounded by wire fences ten feet high, and the farmyard hens employed as foster- 

 mothers were at large in these fields. The birds were pinioned when five days old. 

 I wanted them to be able to fly a little, and severed the wing joint with scissors, so 

 as to leave them with two flight feathers. This has proved a costly blunder, for with 

 only those two flight feathers the birds could fly over the ten feet of wire with the 

 greatest ease. It was quite a business to catch them in October, when I moved into 

 Sussex, and indeed I left several birds in the woods of Conholt Park. Before turning 

 them down in Sussex I removed the two flight feathers from each bird, but despite all 

 precautions, some of the birds still fly over the wire. In shooting my woods several 

 were seen, and two were shot, being mistaken for ordinary wild birds, so well did they 

 fly. Each pen consists of several acres of wood, pasture, and arable land, which will be 

 sown with corn and buckwheat. Only five hens and one (unrelated) cock run to the 

 acre, therefore this breed of pheasant should remain free from all civilized diseases. 

 I may mention that I have noticed that the birds are extremely fond of the flower of the 

 common charlock." 



The Mero oasis is one of the most wonderful, if not the largest in Asia, and owes 

 its richness to the Murghab River. This, instead of being "the fairest of all streams," 

 as it is called in Lalla Rookh, is, so Curtis tells us, "a muddy turgid river, the colour of 

 poor coffee, flowing in a channel of brown clay, between high banks which cave in every 

 year during high water and always are likely to crumble. In the spring months, when 

 the snow is melting in the mountains, the Murghab is a terrible torrent, tearing its way 

 through the desert with irresistible force. In the fall of the year, exhausted by those 

 exertions, emaciated by evaporation and the demands of the irrigation canals, it is a 

 sullen, stagnant, unwholesome stream. The annual overflow usually covers the low 

 places in the valley with water, which remains in stagnant ponds after the flood recedes, 

 and slowly evaporates, leaving slimy acres of decaying vegetation to poison the air." 

 It is among such surroundings that the Prince of Wales's Pheasant lives, and will 



