INTRODUCTION. 



By Eeic Parker. 



Eleven years have passed since the pubhcation of the last 

 edition of this book, which has long been the standard work 

 on its subject, and during this period much has happened 

 to alter the conditions of pheasant-shooting. But the 

 change is in reality only part of a long development 

 spreading from a much earlier date. When the late 

 W. B. Tegetmeier first set out to bring into the compass of 

 a single book the accumulated experience of himself and of 

 others in the matter of rearing pheasants in covert and in 

 confinement, the science necessarj'^ for conducting a day's 

 shooting, as the sequence to a season's breeding and feeding, 

 was very little understood. On many estates birds were 

 being shot very much as in the days of Peter Hawker, who, 

 if he caught sight of a cock pheasant in the Longparish woods, 

 would turn out the staff of garden and farm to put the bird 

 on the wing. Wild birds were the rule rather than the excep- 

 tion ; the First of October was a day to be looked forward 

 to, like the First of September ; and if a pair of spaniels could 

 bustle a bird out of a spinney or a hedgerow it was enough 

 if he could be made to fly — there was no thought that he should 

 fly better. Even on estates where birds were bred and put 

 into the woods no care was taken to beat them out, except 

 in the most haphazard, straightforward fashion, when it came 



