The Common Pheasant 
81 
" Its food consists of grain, seeds, fruits, and berries, with green herbs, insects, and worms, 
varying with the time of year. Ants, and particularly their larvae, are a favourite food, the latter 
forming the chief support of the young. It also eats many green weeds, the tender shoots of 
grass, cabbage, young clover, wild cress, pimpernel, young peas, &c. &c. Of berries : the wild 
mezereum (Daphne mezereum) ; wild strawberries (Fragaria) ; currants ; elderberries from the species 
Sambucus racemosa, S. nigra, and 5. ebulus ; blackberries (Rubus castas, R. idceus, and R. fruticosits) ; 
mistletoe (Viscum album); hawthorn (Cratagus torminalis). Plums, apples, and pears it eats 
readily ; and cherries, mulberries, and grapes it also takes when it can get them. In the autumn 
ripe seeds are its chief food. It eats those of many of the sedges and grasses, and of several 
species of Polygonum, as P. dumetorum ; black bindweed (P. convolvulus) ; knot grass (P. aviculare) ; 
and also those of the cow-wheat (Melampyram) ; and acorns, beech-mast, &c, form a large portion 
of its food in the latter months of the year. Amongst forest plants, it likes the seeds of 
the hemp-nettle (Galcopsis), and it also feeds on almost all the seeds the farmer sows." 
To this long catalogue we can add its fondness for pig-nuts, buttercup tubers, the 
common polypody, peas, beans, acorns and beech-nuts, silvenveed, ranunculus, and a 
host of grass seeds it is unnecessary to enumerate. I have heard of young Pheasants 
being successfully reared on horse-flesh, and they will always search horse-dung for the 
undigested grains of oats. They like earth-worms, and Mr. Tegetmeier records "that a 
Pheasant was killed in 1888 that had three young vipers in its crop." There are also 
two instances of their swallowing slow-worms. Mr. G. F. Passmore records in the Field, 
June 2, 1900, a case of a penned hen Pheasant's death due to its trying to swallow a 
large viper. There seems to be but little of an eatable size that a Pheasant will not 
attempt to swallow, for the same author records two instances of cock Pheasants being 
"killed by swallowing" alive a field-vole. Their fondness for snails, ants and their 
eggs, and slugs, is also well known. 
Mr. H. Wormald writes : — 
" In the early spring pheasants are exceedingly fond of the roots of the wild arum, or 
' Lord and Lady.' I have known pheasants to die from the effects of eating hairy caterpillars 
of the woolly-bear type. 
"A well-known Scotch forester, Mr. William Forbes of Blairgowrie, assured me that he 
had himself witnessed the following incident : He had been planting acorns covered with red- 
lead, to protect them against the ravages of field-mice, when a cock pheasant came along, 
scratched up the acorns, took them in his bill, and deliberately wiped the red-lead off them 
on the grass, and then swallowed them." 1 
Pheasants do a considerable amount of damage in the spring to crops, and if you 
are the possessor of a rock-garden you do not love the old cock at any season, for he 
makes a point of scratching up and destroying your choicest treasures. They are also 
very mischievous in pulling off the flowers of daffodils. On the other hand, Pheasants 
are of the greatest assistance to the farmer by destroying vast quantities of injurious 
insects. Over twelve hundred wire-worms have been taken from. the crop of a single 
Pheasant. Mr. Frederick Bond states in the Zoologist that he took from the crop of a 
Pheasant four hundred grubs of the crane-fly, one of the most destructive insects to 
pastures. Like the sparrow, the Pheasant has friends as well as enemies, but on the 
whole the verdict in its favour is overwhelming. 
1 A Pheasant or a domestic fowl will always wipe away any objectionable matter from its food, and the fact that the bird 
in question did so does not prove the fact that it knew the poisonous nature of the red-lead. — J. G. M. 
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