xiv Tegetmeier on Pheasants. 



her brood from the covert to the cornfield and the hedgerow. 

 And she disproved, perhajjs put an end to, an ancient heresy. 

 One after another in the gunroom, and one after another in 

 book and newspaper, talkers and writers had repeated the 

 shibboleth that the wild pheasant was a bad mother. There 

 were a hundred observed facts at their elbow to disprove 

 it had they looked for them — hen pheasants sitting on eggs 

 through deluges of rain, lifted nest and all from danger to 

 safety perhaps on a farm fork ; hen pheasants attacking 

 stoats, dogs, men in defence of their young ; hen pheasants 

 and their broods surviving among countless enemies from the 

 days of the Eomans to our own. But the war, even to the 

 bhndest who would not see, proved that the hen pheasant 

 is as good a mother as other birds. And when the war ended 

 wild hen pheasants all over the country had provided a stock 

 with which we could, if we wished, reconstruct the sport of 

 covert-shooting. 



And once again the pendulum swung to the other extreme. 

 Nobody seemed to want to rear pheasants. Some, who knew 

 best how it should be done, could not afford it ; others, who 

 had the means, did not know what to do with them. And a 

 third class decided to go on with only wild birds. They may 

 even have tried to persuade themselves that wild birds made 

 better sport ; but they confused good sport, I think, a little 

 with poor shooting. For the wild bird, except under rare 

 conditions, does not give good shooting ; it may be good fun 

 to find him, and to add him to a mixed bag, but it is impossible 

 to enjoy li-fting a gun at a pheasant Avhich gets up at j-our 

 feet out of a bramble-bush and flies straight away a couple 

 of yards above the ground. And the war. one may beheve, 

 had even taught wild pheasants how to hide or run rather 

 than to fly, so that they became as poor marks as the 

 hungriest pot-hunter could pray for. We came, in short, 

 after two or three seasons, back to the beginning again, with 

 the same kind of pheasant to shoot at that Hawker chased 

 with Hodge. 



