50 



Points on Care and Breeding of Pheasants, etc. 



"The ringnecks' eggs are nearly all fertile and we often get a perfect setting, that is, 

 every egg hatches. During the first of the season we use fourteen or fifteen eggs to a setting, 

 but when it gets warm, from sixteen to eighteen eggs are placed under a hen. Last year the 

 eggs accumulated so rapidly that we did not have hens enough to handle them, so we placed 

 them in the incubator for a few days and gave them to the hens as fast as we found birds 

 under which to place them. 



"It takes from twenty- three to twenty-four days to hatch ringneck pheasant eggs, and 

 about twenty-one days for golden and Lady Amherst eggs. 



"The coops are placed about twenty feet apart and as you look over the breeding grounds 

 it reminds you of a miniature white city. Some of the coops are surrounded by a pen twelve 

 inches high, in which the chicks are kept prisoners for the first four days. This is necessary 

 because experience has taught us that young pheasants, like young partridges, will run away 

 and become lost if given their liberty as soon as hatched. They do not seem to understand 

 the language of their foster mother, but after the lapse of three or four days they learn her 

 call-notes and obey, returning to her for food and to be brooded at night. We do not, as a 

 rule, liberate the hens with their broods. 



"During the first twenty-four hours we do not feed the chicks, they do not require it, as 

 the nourishment obtained from the yolk of the egg is sufficient. For the first four days they 

 are fed plain table custard mixed with chick food. Then we gradually break them in on a 

 more substantial diet; eggs that have been dropped into boiling water and allowed to cool 

 in it, then crushed through a piece of common wire mosquito netting and mixed with Sprat's 

 Pheasant Food, bread crumbs, corn meal and crumbled cornbread. After a week of such 

 feeding we change again, this time gradually diminishing the amount of boiled egg and adding 

 raw food, such as fine corn meal, crushed grains, and finally the best of raw Hamburg steak. 

 We keep them on this food until they are old and strong enough to be given the regular food 

 fed to the adult birds; buckwheat, wheat, cracked corn, kaffir corn, raw pumpkin, squash, 

 sugar beets, mangel wurzel, cabbage, lettuce, dandelion tops and boiled potatoes and turnips. 

 The young pheasants are very fond of dandelion leaves and roots and people bring bag after 

 bag of them to the park for us, as they dig them from their lawns. 



"For the first three months we feed the young birds considerable chopped meat so as 

 to induce a rapid and hardy growth, if sour milk is plentiful we make cottage cheese for them. 



"Aside from the fact that when being reared they should be kept on a grassy meadow 

 or flat, the care of pheasants should be quite like that given to chickens. Last year we ex- 

 perimented with a few of our birds and were so well pleased with the result that we shall 

 adopt it on a much larger scale this season, and if we are as successful as before, the rearing 

 of'pheasants will be no more difficult than rearing chickens. 



"We have tried feeding the chicks on maggots as they do in Europe, but so many of 

 them died of ptomaine poison that we found it an utter failure in this section of the country. 



"When we have old birds confined that we have decided to use for restocking the covers, 

 we liberate them at a time when grasshoppers and insects are abundant. But we pay little 



