1 8 TURKEYS AND PHEASxYNTS. 
the gobbling of the male is heard at intervals of a few minutes 
for hours together, and affords often a gratifying means of their 
discovery to the wakeful hunter. After this period the males 
become lean and emaciated so as to be even unable to fly, and 
seek to hide themselves from their mates in the closest thick- 
ets, where they are seldom seen. They now also probably 
undergo their moult, and are so dry, lean, and lousy, until the 
ripening of the mast and berries, as to be almost wholly indi- 
gestible and destitute of nutriment as food. So constant is 
this impoverished state that the Indians have a proverb, “ As 
lean as a Turkey in summer.” 
About the middle of April, in Kentucky, the hens begin to 
provide for the reception of their eggs and secure their pros- 
pects of incubation. I’he nest, merely a slight hollow scratched 
in the ground and lined with withered leaves, is made by the 
side of a fallen log or beneath the shelter of a thicket in a 
dry place. The eggs, from lo to 15, are whitish, covered with 
red dots and measuring two and seven eighths inches in length 
by two in breadth, and rather pointed. While laying, the 
female, like the domestic bird, always approaches the nest with 
great caution, varying the course at almost every visit and 
often concealing her eggs entirely by coveriirg them with 
leaves. Trusting to the similarity of her homely garb with the 
withered foliage around her, the hen, as with several other 
birds, on being carefully approached sits close without mov- 
ing. She seldom indeed abandons her nest, and her attach- 
ment increases with the growing life of her charge. The 
domestic bird has been known, not unfrequently, to sit stead- 
fastly on her eggs until she died of hunger. As soon as the 
young have emerged from the shell and begun to run about, 
the parent by her cluck calls them around her and watches 
with redoubled suspicion the approach of their enemies, which 
she can perceive at an almost inconceivable distance. To 
avoid moisture, which might prove fatal to them, they now 
keep on the higher sheltered knolls ; and in about a fortnight, 
instead of roosting on the ground, they begin to fly at night to 
some wide and low branch, where they still continue to nestle 
