oS Feeding in Covert. 



well attended to. If weight and bulk are objects, a foot or 

 two of the straw can be cut from each sheaf or bundle of 

 corn before it is taken to the stacks. The ears should be 

 put inside, or half the corn will be taken by small birds ; and 

 the bottom of the stack should stand at least a foot from the 

 ground. I use as food in winter, peas, beans, barley, buck- 

 wheat, wheat, and a few oats, and many other little dehcacies 

 such as boiled potatoes, ground artichokes, decayed apples, 

 damaged raisins, etc. ; and with all these dainties, they will 

 stray twice in the year — when the acorns fall and at or just 

 before breeding-time." 



The following most complete series of suggestions on 

 feeding pheasants in coverts is from the pen of Mr. James 

 Barnes, of Exmouth. It is specially A-aluable as giving 

 practical directions for the formation of catchpools for 

 water, without which no amount of feeding will keep pheasants 

 from straying in dry weather ; and it also contains suggestions 

 for the formation of huts, which are worthy of the careful 

 consideration of every preserver on a large scale. Mr. Barnes 

 writes : " Pheasants are well-known to require assistance 

 with food of some kind in winter to keep them in good 

 condition, and to have a propensity to ramble away and 

 expose themselves to the depredations of trespassers. Buck- 

 wheat should be sown adjacent to their coverts, cut when 

 ripe and intermixed with barley, also in straw, and placed in 

 little stacks in or near their coverts, and spread or shaken 

 about at intervals throughout the winter. What is still 

 better, to my mind, is to place their food in huts. A pheasant 

 hut is an open shed with the roof fixed on four posts, with a 

 polf all round for rafter plate, the rafters of rough poles tied 

 on with withies, thatched first with long faggots tied up 

 with three or four withies of brushwood with all the leaves 

 on, and allowed to hang down or over the rafter plate 

 two feet or thereabouts. The thatch used should be small 

 brushwood, reeds, or straw. An open trellis floor of poles 

 should be raised two feet from the ground, and on this 



