1 8 TURKEYS AND PHEASANTS. 



the gobbling of the male is heard at intervals of i a few minutes 

 for hours together, and affords often a gratifying means of their 

 discovery to the wakeful hunter. After this period the males 

 become lean and emaciated so as to be even unable to fly, and 

 seek to hide themselves from their mates in the closest thick- 

 ets, where they are seldom seen. They now also probably 

 undergo their moult, and are so dry, lean, and lousy^ until the 

 ripening of the mast and berries, as to be almost wholly indi' 

 gestible and destitute of nutriment as food. So constant is 

 this impoverished state that the Indians have a proverb, "As 

 lean as a Turkey in summer.'' 



About the middle of April, in Kentucky, the hens begin to 

 provide for the reception of their eggs and secure their pros- 

 pects of incubation. The nest, merely a slight hollow scratched 

 in the ground and lined with withered leaves, is made by the 

 side of a fallen log or beneath the shelter of a thicket in a 

 dry place. The eggs, from lo to 15, are whitish, covered with 

 red dots and measuring two and seven eighths inches in length 

 by two in breadth, and rather pointed. While laying, the 

 female, like the domestic bird, always approaches the nest with 

 great caution, varying the course at almost every Visit and 

 often concealing her eggs entirely by covering them with 

 leaves. Trusting to the similarity of her homely garb with the 

 withered foliage around her, the hen, as with several other 

 birds, on being carefully approached sits close without mov- 

 ing. She seldom indeed abandons her nest, and her attach- 

 ment increases with the growing life of her charge. The 

 domestic bird has been known, not unfrequently, to sit stead- 

 fastly on her eggs until she died of hunger. As soon as the 

 young have emerged from the shell and begun to run about, 

 the parent by her cluck calls them around her and watches 

 with redoubled suspicion the approach of their enemies, which 

 she can perceive at an almost inconceivable distance. To 

 avoid moisture, which might prove fatal to them, they now 

 keep on the higher sheltered knolls ; and in about a fortnight, 

 instead of roosting on the ground, they begin to fly at night to 

 some wide and low branch, where they still continue to nestle 



