10' NATURAL HISTOEY OF THE PHEASANTS. 



of her eggs. Several examples of this occurrence are on record, but the foUowin^ 

 inay suffice to prove that the circumstance is not so unfrequent as may have been 

 supposed. One correspondent writes as follows : " Our head-keeper told me that one 

 of his watchers had found a pheasant's nest up a spruce fir tree. I was incredu- 

 lous, so I went with him, and had the under-man there to show us. The bird 

 was sitting on the nest— an old squirrel's. The man said she had twelve eggs. 

 He also told us that he knew of another in a similar situation in the same 

 plantation. The nest I saw was about twelve feet from the ground. The 

 watchers found it in looking for nests of flying vermin, as some had escaped the 

 traps." 



Another states: "A keeper on the Oulhorn estate, when on his rounds in 

 search of vermin, observed a nest, which he took to be that of a hawk, on a Scotch 

 fir tree, about fifteen feet from the ground. On throwing up a stone, out flew a 

 fine hen pheasant. The keeper then ascended the tree, and found, to his astonish- 

 ment, eight pheasants' eggs in an old owl's nest. He removed the eggs, and 

 placed them under a hen, and at the expiration of three days he had eight fine 

 lively pheasant birds." 



A third states that " at Ohaddlewood, near Plympton, Devon, a pheasant 

 has built its nest (twelve feet from the ground) in the fork of an ash tree close 

 to the house, and has now laid eight eggs." 



It is difficult to ascertain whether or not in the instances in which the 

 young are hatched in these elevated situations, they fall out of the nest and are 

 killed and carried away by predatory animals, or whether they are safely removed 

 by the parent birds, and if so, by what means ; even the following accounts do 

 not throw much light upon the subject. A correspondent of The Meld stated that 

 " A hen pheasant made her nest in an oak tree, about nine feet from the ground. 

 The young "were hatched, and she succeeded in taking seven young ones safely to 

 the ground, leaving five dead in the nest, and one bad egg." A second stated 

 that in the park at KUingham, Lincoln, a pheasant deposited eight eggs in the 

 nest of a woodpigeon in a fir tree upwards of sixteen feet from the ground; she 

 hatched out seven of them, but was unfortunate, as four were killed; they were 

 supposed to have fallen from the nest. And a third reported that on the estate of 

 the Marquis of Hertford, at Sudborne Hall, Suffolk, a pheasant had taken pos- 

 session of a nest deserted by a sparrow-hawk, in a spruce fir, twenty-five feet 

 from the ground, and hatched eight young ones, seven of which she succeeded in 

 bringing safely down, but in what manner was not stated. 



Although as a rule the male pheasant takes no heed of the eggs laid by the 

 female, or of the offspring when hatched, there are some well ascertained exceptions. 

 Wild cock pheasants have been seen sitting in nests in the coverts by perfectly 

 credible witnesses ; and, although it has been suggested that the birds might have 



