122. The Natural History of British Game Birds 
in the two blind caeca. This disease is also found in fowls and pheasants, and sets 
up a fatal typhlitis. Mr. A. E. Shipley states that the earlier stages of the life of 
these worms is passed in water, so that it is essential that birds should have a pure 
water supply. 
The first week in September is now more generally associated with deer-stalking 
than the pursuit of Partridges. Even in the south few of the birds are fit to kill, 
except for the table, until the middle of the month. I have seen Partridges unfit 
to shoot in Aberdeenshire until October ioth, and though there is likely to be a law 
prohibiting the killing of blackgame until October ist, a similar one should be enforced 
for Partridges north of the Tay valley. 
A few words on new methods of increasing the Partridge stock may not be out 
of place, although the subject has been well and extensively treated in Mr. C. Aling- 
ton's excellent little book, Partridge Driving, a work I can cordially recommend to all 
sportsmen. 1 The importation of Hungarians is good, provided the new-comers are 
used with discretion. It is quite possible to turn out Hungarians year after year 
without effecting a change of blood. These imported birds almost invariably select 
mates from their own coveys, so that unless general egg changing is carried out by 
the keepers, no cross-breeding will result. The penning system is also an excellent 
one if conducted with due observance of the laws of Nature. Partridges as well as 
other birds resent the marriage-maker, and must be left to choose their own mates. 
No forcing of pairs together is of any use. It must be a case of spontaneous affection 
or no eggs will be the result. In Elginshire, on Sir William Gordon Cumming's 
estate, the bag has been doubled by this system, as well as in many other places 
in the south. A third system is to make up the nests with additional eggs — a plan, 
I think, invented and carried out with great success by Marlow, the head keeper 
at the Grange, in Hampshire. It is a curious fact that in confinement a hen Par- 
tridge will lay as many as thirty to forty eggs if she is well fed. Wild Partridges 
will lay almost as many if their nests are robbed with discretion. There is yet 
another method of increasing stock by 
"... taking away the wild partridge's eggs as she lays them, incubating them under domestic 
hens, and when a number (greatly in excess of one partridge's laying) are chipped, and within 
twelve hours of hatching, they are taken to the robbed nest of some sitting partridge and there 
deposited. With the frequent assistance of the cock bird, who never sat before, but is always 
ready to do so when the chip-chip of the shell gives him female confidence in results, large 
coveys are hatched off as easily as small ones. The importance of all this is that the sitting 
bird has not necessarily been expending her energies, and tempting foxes and vermin, for more 
than ten days, instead of for the customary twenty-four. She has only been sitting on clear 
pheasants' eggs, which would never have hatched in any case, and have been thoughtfully 
provided to keep her brooding instinct alive, so that her own eggs have escaped danger 
altogether. 
"In the pens, or with this Newmarket system of preserving, vermin and the weather, the 
flood, the frost, and the thunderstorm are set at naught. In Nature many a poor partridge, 
and grouse too, comes back to her bad eggs after having been flooded off, and sits, and sits, 
until she is a rag of bones and feathers, doomed to die by her one all-pervading brooding 
1 The French system of rearing Partridges is also well described by Mr. W. H. St. Quintin in the Field, Aug. 26, r8qa; 
and Oct. 7, r8ao. 
