124 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



now absolutely motionless and silent, and at the next hint of danger the cocks are up 

 and away with a rushing whirr of wings, while the hens may wait for still another 

 threat, trusting to their perfect resemblance to the grass and dead leaves. 



The keenness and accuracy of their sense of hearing is proven by their avoidance of 

 the direction of a suspicious sound, no matter how low it may have been, and how 

 completely concealed its author. Their eyesight, in turn, is superb, and a cock in full 

 flight will swerve at the least glint of a gun barrel, when nothing else is visible. 

 Hunters who have dressed in white, and attempted to stalk pheasants in the snow, have 

 found that they would be detected a hundred yards away, the cocks running rapidly up 

 the hill-sides and watching their pursuers from the summit. 



Like the crows of our cornfields, Chinese pheasants soon learn to distinguish 

 between harmless coolies and hunters. They will feed and walk about in full view of a 

 gang of working coolies, and be off like a shot at the approach of a man with a gun. 



While the deforestation of the country and the development of paddy cultivation 

 actually favour the increase of pheasants, the compensation lies in the correspondingly 

 greater number of foreign so-called sportsmen, who go out from the cities in crowds 

 and bring back large bags of hens. Their lack of sportsmanship prevents them from 

 trying to distinguish between the sexes when the birds rise, and their lack of skill makes 

 the slower rising and flying hen their prey, while the wary, swift cock more often 

 escapes. The pot-hunting Japanese and Macao Portuguese also account for a vast 

 number of hens. 



Especially where persecuted. Ring-neck Pheasants are masters in the art of 

 detecting and avoiding danger. The cocks can rise almost vertically from a patch of 

 reeds or grass and with a few rapid wing-beats attain a terrific speed, which carries 

 them far out of danger. On the other hand, they know when it pays to risk hiding. 

 George Eanning has given a vivid account of this in a Shanghai newspaper, where, as 

 he says, it would seem utterly impossible for a cock pheasant to hide himself amongst a 

 few tufts of dead winter grass. Yet a bird can vanish in such a place as completely as 

 if the earth had opened and swallowed it up. The plumage of the pheasant contains 

 spots or splashes of red, blue, black, green, brown and yellow. The two latter shades 

 are common enough among the blades of grass and straw, the reds are present in stalks 

 and ground leaves, the greens are always present in the evergreens, while the blacks and 

 dark blues may represent the shadows and dark places between the stalks and under 

 the leaves of the plants. Yet with all this understandable colour logic, the disappearing 

 pheasant is as wonderful as ever. 



Mr. Wade records a bag of eighteen hundred and one pheasants made in twenty- 

 three days at Ewo, shot over dogs in open fields. Lanning says, that ''the cream of 

 the shooting is to be got perhaps a little before Christmas ; a great deal depends on 

 the condition of the crops. My best time amongst the long-tails happened one year, 

 after Christmas, in a piece of country along the Grand Canal, between Kahshing and 

 Soochow, where at ordinary times one rarely found anything. On this occasion, 

 however, for some reason or other, a few patches of paddy had been left, the only ones 

 apparently in the whole district, and to them pheasants from far and near had been 

 attracted. 



" In a couple of hours before sunset, and another couple of hours next morning 



