FREAKS AND ODDITIES 53 



of wild Reeves's Pheasants for the last twenty years. 

 They have bred freely in his preserves, and he has 

 shot no fewer than ninety cock birds, besides dispos- 

 ing of fifty-five pairs of live birds, and others have 

 been shot after they had strayed out of his woods. 

 But these birds have not crossed with the Common 

 Pheasants which share their haunts. On the con- 

 trary, the larger birds chase the others off the ground. 

 They often indulge in furious fights, the result some- 

 times being that they kill one another. M. Dably 

 has kept both these species in his park at Saint- 

 Germain-les-Corbeil for six years, and they get 

 on well together. The hens of these two species 

 sometimes lay in one nest, but they do not interbreed. 

 A hybrid between Reeves's Pheasant and the common 

 bird has indeed been obtained in France, but M. Van 

 Kempen, who bought it at Lille in December 1879, 

 ascertained that it had been sent thither in a consign- 

 ment of English pheasants. But wild pheasants are 

 well known to interbreed in cases where their territory 

 happens to overlap, as is the case with the Black- 

 backed and White-crested Kaleege. Moreover, M. 

 Maingounat, a Paris naturalist, informed M. Suchetet 

 that he found among a consignment of Versicolor and 

 ScEmmerring's Pheasants a single individual which 

 presented well-defined characteristics of both these 



