FORMATION OF COVERTS. 49 



month of June. By the time that the harvest is all in, these 

 cabbages will afford a most excellent aliment to the pheasant, 

 and are particularly serviceable when the ground is deeply 

 covered with snow. I often think that pheasants are 

 unintentionally destroyed by farmers during the autumnal 

 seed-time. They have a custom of steeping the wheat in 

 arsenic water. This must be injurious to birds which pick 

 up the corn remaining on the surface of the mould. I some- 

 times find pheasants, at this period,! dead in the plantations, 

 and now and then take them up weak and languid, and quite 

 unable to fly. I will mention here a little robbery by the 

 pheasants, which has entirely deprived me of a gratification 

 I used formerly to experience in an evening's saunter down 

 the vale. They have completely exterminated the grass- 

 hoppers. For the last fourteen years I have not once heard 

 the voice of this merry summer charmer in the party. In 

 order to render useless all attempts of the nocturnal poacher 

 to destroy the pheasants, it is absolutely necessary that a 

 place of security should be formed. I know of no position 

 more appropriate than a piece of level ground at the bottom 

 of the hill, bordered by a gentle stream. About three acres 

 of this, sowed with whins, and surrounded by a holly fence to 

 keep the cattle out, would be the very thing. In the centre 

 of it, for the space of one acre, there ought to be planted 

 spruce fir trees, about 14ft. asunder. Next to the larch, this 

 species of tree is generally preferred by the pheasants for 

 their roosting-place ; and it is quite impossible that the 

 poachers can shoot them in these trees. Moreover, magpies 

 and jays will always resort to them at nightfall; and they 

 never fail to give the alarm on "the first appearance of an 

 enemy. Six or seven dozen of wooden pheasants, nailed on 

 the branches of trees in the surrounding woods, cause 

 unutterable vexation and loss of ammunition to these 

 amateurs of nocturnal plunder. Small clumps of hollies and 

 yew trees, with holly hedges round them, are of infinite 

 service, when planted at intervals of one hundred and fifty 



