LAYING AND HATCHING. 65 



the earliest possible opportunity. We do not assert that those nuisances the rooks 

 are dangerous in this stage of the pheasant breeding, although we should deem it 

 imprudent to trust them too far; but there can be no doubt about the desires of 

 that long-tailed hawk on the hover on the hiU above, although, being a conspicuous 

 enemy, the precautions taken against him have almost driven him to despair. And 

 there a weasel is watching, popping his head at intervals out of different holes in 

 the neighbouring bank, undeterred by the fate of several of his family, who have 

 already been trapped there and gibbeted. But more dangerous than hawk or weasel 

 are the jackdaws. Eor, as these vociferous birds bear comparatively respectable 

 characters, they are more likely to be indulged with a licence they abuse. We know 

 them to be havards : we cannot deny the family tendency to kleptomania. But we 

 are in the way of believing chattering to be the sign of a frank, shallow nature, 

 and we are apt to condone the thefts that are perpetrated with no view to profit. 

 In reality, the jackdaw is a deep hypocrite — a robber and a bloody-beaked murderer. 

 He chatters his way from branch to branch above the coops with the most uncon- 

 cerned air in the world— just as a human thief walks, whistling, with his hands in 

 his pockets, towards the prey he means to make a snatch at. Then, when he sees 

 himself unnoticed, the jackdaw stills his chatter and makes his stealthy swoop; and 

 in this way, watching while your watcher's back is turned, he massacres a whole 

 family of your innocents, and the hawks and weasels get the credit of the crime. 

 But, after all, a gun kept upon the spot generally inspires a salutary dread. Many 

 of your young birds survive the perils of their cheeperhood; then the long grass in 

 the neighbouring bits of covert becomes alive with them, and once in that stage 

 they are comparatively safe. Thenceforward tUl the autumn they feed and thrive, 

 strengthen and fatten. And sport, sale, and the autumn game course out of the 

 question, what can be pleasanter or prettier in the way of sounds or sights than the 

 young birds learning to crow in your coverts as you saunter out before breakfast, or 

 scattered about your lawn as you dine with open windows of a summer evening ; 

 Pace Mr. Tegetmeier, and other gallinaceous authorities, we must say that in the 

 way of pets we prefer pheasants to poultry." 



Many pheasant rearers are so short-sighted as to recruit their ^tock of eggs 

 by purchase, forgetting that in the great majority of cases these eggs are stolen 

 either from their own or from other preserves. In some cases the keepers 

 themselves purloin the eggs and sell them to the dealers, from whom they are 

 perhaps repurchased by the owner of the very estate from whence they were 

 abstracted. As an example of the mode in which these frauds are perpetrated, I 

 may adduce the following example, furnished by a correspondent : — " On a smaU. 

 estate in Sussex there was a pheasantry with about seventy-five birds, and when the 

 laying commenced the eggs were taken up carefully two or three times a day; the 

 keeper had these eggs out as he got the hens ready to sit, which was three or four 



