THE PHEASANT. 
105 
|)heasants5 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- 
