THE PHEASANT. 



105 



pheasants, and are particularly serviceable when the 

 ground is deeply covered with snow. I often think 

 that pheasants are unintentionally destroyed by 

 farmers during the autumnal seedtime. They have 

 a custom of steeping the wheat in arsenic water. 

 This must be injurious to birds which pick up the 

 corn remaining on the surface of the mould. I 

 sometimes find pheasants, at this period, dead in 

 the plantations, and now and then take them up, 

 weak and languid, and quite unable to fly. 



I will mention, here, a little robbery by the 

 pheasants, which has entirely deprived me of a grati- 

 fication I used formerly to experience in an even- 

 ing's saunter down the vale. They have completely 

 exterminated the grasshoppers. For these last 

 fourteen years I have not once heard the voice of 

 this merry summer charmer in the park. 



In order to render useless all attempts of the 

 nocturnal poacher to destroy the pheasants, it is 

 absolutely necessary that a place of security should 

 be formed. I know of no position more appropriate 

 than a piece of level ground, at the bottom of a 

 hill, bordered by a gentle stream. About three 

 acres of this, sowed with whins, and surrounded by 

 a holly fence, to keep the cattle out, would be the 

 very thing. In the centre of it, for the space of 

 one acre, there ought to be planted spruce fir trees, 

 about fourteen feet asunder. Next to the larch, 

 this species of tree is generally preferred by the 

 pheasants for their roosting place ; and it is quite 

 impossible that the poachers can shoot them in 

 these trees. Moreover, magpies and jays will al- 



