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table all the young produced in the spring months, which were 

 mostly of the hardy natural blue, and sparing to recruit the flock 

 the autumnal nestlings, which nature, aware of their tenderness, 

 was prone to clothe in white, so as to enable them if possible to 

 survive the winter, by a plumage that should lose a minimum 

 of animal caloric through radiation. I immediately ordered all 

 nestlings of the month of May to be allowed to escape, and all 

 autumn nestlings to be killed for the table. The result was a 

 rapid return to the normal blue, in the aspect of our flock. 



Let us now see whether there is anything in connection with 

 game-birds, besides the variable colouring of grouse, according 

 to the more or less dark and heathery surfaces of the moors they 

 inhabit, from which matter of instruction can be drawn. 



It so happens that I have had long acquaintance with the 

 common pheasant of the quasi-collared or ringed variety (so fre- 

 quent in North Northumberland) in its true feral state. Our 

 pheasants at Hedgeley have at no period been reared under arti- 

 ficial management. They have always been allowed to deposit 

 and sit their own eggs in their own way, and to bring up their 

 young as truly unaided as partridge or grouse. Hence they are 

 truly wild pheasants : nor are any of the species bred artificially 

 by my neighbours nearer than perhaps a few at Shawdon, three 

 miles distant. Yet my birds have been repeatedly throwing out, 

 per saltum, the pallescent, or blonde variation, which has been 

 absurdly called a Bohemian pheasant. And I believe, if sports- 

 men could only have been persuaded to abstain from shooting 

 out the cocks, this variation would have gained more and more 

 on the normal aspect of the British pheasant in our locality and 

 district. 



"We never see pied or pure white birds, neither imperfectly 

 straw-tinted ones. But there comes forth a cock pheasant, so 

 like in hue to the wheaten stubble on which he walks, that 

 nothing but his head and neck, of the ordinary rich purple, 

 can be discerned from a little distance. "When again he roosts 

 in the naked larch in winter he is less conspicuous by far than 

 his fellows of the coverts ; and we may be sure that there will 

 be less loss of animal warmth from his light buff plumage, than 



