Slow -Worms : Vipers. 7 



Mr. John Bishop, of Llandovery, killed a pheasant on the 

 coast of Islay whose crop was filled with the coloured snail's 

 shells abounding on the bents or grass stems on the coast. 

 At the meeting of the British Ornithologists' Club, October 21, 

 1896, I exhibited some snail shells {Helix nemoralis) of full size, 

 no fewer than forty-eight of which I had taken out of the crop 

 of a pheasant. 



Lord Lilford, in his beautiful work on the " Birds of 

 Northamptonshire," writes : " The pheasant, where not pre- 

 served in unreasonable numbers, is a good friend to the 

 farmer, from the enormous number of wireworms and other 

 noxious insects which it devours, to say nothing of its liking 

 for the roots of various weeds ; biit it would be absurd to 

 deny that grain forms its favourite food, and a field of standing 

 beans will, as is well known, draw pheasants for miles. It 

 is very much the fashion to feed the birds with maize ; but 

 in our opinion the flesh of pheasants which have been prin- 

 cipally fed upon this corn is very far inferior in flavour to that 

 of those Avho have found their own living upon what the land 

 may offer them." 



Like their allies, the domestic fowls, pheasants are occa- 

 sionally carnivorous in their appetite. A correspondent 

 writes : " This morning my keeper brought me a pied cock 

 pheasant, found dead (but still warm) in some standing barley. 

 The bird was in the finest condition, and showed no marks 

 whatever, when plucked, of a violent death. On searching 

 the gullet I extracted a short-tailed field mouse, which had 

 doubtless caused death by strangulation." And a similar 

 instance was recorded by Mr. Hutton, of Northallerton. The 

 Hon. and Eev. C. Bathurst, in a letter published in Lovdon's 

 Magazine of Natural History, vol. ii., p. 153, relates that Sir 

 John Ogilvy saw a pheasant flying off with a common slow- 

 worm (Anguis fragilis) ; that this reptile does sometimes form 

 part of the food of the pheasant is confirmed by Mr. J. E. 

 Harting, who recounts in his work on " The Birds of Middle- 

 sex," that " on examining the crop of a pied pheasant, shot in. 



