46 THE BOOK OF BIRDS 



Pheasant is thickly dispersed is the Norfolk heath district. 

 In this extraordinary country, now largely planted, and 

 also much covered with bracken fern, the Pheasant is 

 everywhere." 



The roving cat and the blood-thirsty weasel tribe are 

 among the Pheasant's enemies. The poacher, too, has 

 still to be reckoned with, as for centuries past. He has 

 his own ways of bagging this coveted game-bird, and the 

 gun is only one of these ; some are ingenious enough. 



The late Charles Waterton, who was a land-owner as 

 well as a naturalist, dealt with this nuisance in an 

 original and amusing way of his own. Finding that 

 poachers were in the habit of visiting his fir plantations 

 where the Pheasants roosted, he planted a number of 

 clumps of thick holly bushes. To these dark and im- 

 penetrable retreats, the birds had the good sense to retire 

 at night, their old roosting places being taken by roughly 

 carved dummies made of wood and fixed up in the boughs 

 of the fir trees. The next time the poachers paid the 

 plantations a visit Waterton made no attempt to interfere 

 with them, but stayed in his house, laughing to himself at 

 the crack, crack, of the trespassers' shots at the wooden 

 figures in the trees. 



A Pheasant's nest is a very poor affair, being usually 

 a mere litter of leaves and grasses, in the midst of which 

 are laid the ten or twelve olive-brown eggs. Its ordinary 

 place is on the ground, but strange exceptions are now 

 and then recorded in the newspapers. A gamekeeper's 

 son, climbing a tree, one day, to raid what he thought 

 was a woodpigeon's nest, found a Pheasant, sitting. The 

 tree was ''a slender thorn bush, grown round with ivy," 

 and the nest was about eleven feet from the ground. 



A still more curious place for a Pheasant to lay her 



