Part 27

These four are _Phasianus ellioti_ and _Phasianus humiæ_, which are useless for sport. Then the copper pheasant from Japan (_Phasianus sœmmerringi_) Mr. Rothschild thinks eminently suited for the coverts. As it is a native of the same ground as the versicolor pheasant, and neither seems to damage the purity of the other, it may be accepted that its production in our coverts would not degenerate into crossing with the common pheasants. The other of these four species is _Ph. reevesii_, or the Reeves pheasant from China, with its 6 feet of length and, on rare occasions, 6 feet of tail. The worst that has ever been said of these two last-named species is that they fight badly and might drive away the other pheasants, but in the case of the copper pheasant the observation was only the outcome of its behaviour in pens. Mr. Walter Rothschild thinks this bird more suitable for mountainous cold districts than the common pheasant is, and that it should be given the preference in Wales and Scotland, as altogether a hardier bird than the true type pheasant. In this opinion he agrees with the late Lord Lilford, who was by far the best authority of his time. Mr. J. G. Millais wrote of this bird from having shot it at Balmacaan, on Loch Ness, and at Guisichan, near Beauly, in the same county. At the former, then the late Lord Seafield’s place, he found the bird a fraud and a failure, as in the open flat coverts it ran more than it flew, and when it was forced into the element it can make all its own, it flew low and gave no sport. But at Guisachan, Lord Tweedmouth’s place, Mr. Millais had cause to regard the bird as the finest of all the game birds that raced to the guns over the mountain pines. He described it as leaving the common pheasants and the blackcocks flustering along behind at about half the pace of this king of the air, or comet of the woods. Truly sportsmen cannot read Mr. Millais’ account without envy. But, besides the speed, the way this bird can stop itself is a revelation. It does this apparently by offering the full surface of its tail, its body, and its wings simultaneously to air resistance; and if Mr. Millais is correct as to its speed and the power it has of stopping within a few feet, it is a wonder that it does not break its feather shafts as well as itself by the sudden pressure.

Of the 17 type birds it may be said that a true line of colour distinction cannot be drawn, and that their markings run one into the other as they are found East or West and North and South. It is well to regard these two tendencies as different geographic variations, and because the birds seem to have latitude variations in common whatever their longitude may be, and longitudinal variations in common whatever their latitude may be, to hold them all one species with local colour variations and nothing more. In the West the pheasant tends to redness, in the East to greenness, both of back and breast. The extremes are observed in the old English pheasant and the versicolor of Japan. This gradation of colour from East to West is not altered by latitude. But of whatever shade and longitude the birds may be, if they are found in the North they have a large quantity of white upon them, and if in the South they have no white. It is therefore possible to settle the natural home of the pheasant almost accurately by his coloration. The old English pheasant is a native of most of Europe in our time; but the Romans obtained it from Asia Minor, and it is named by ornithologists in consequence _Phasianus colchicus_. In England there are now not any of this breed; ours are all mongrels.

The Persian (_Ph. persicus_) is a near relation to _colchicus_, but has very nearly white wing coverts, narrower bars on the tail, and is dark-red on the sides of the belly. It inhabits West Persia and Transcaspia, and Mr. Rothschild thinks it a good variety for introduction, as it is hardy and flies fast and high.

A near relation is the Afghan pheasant (_Ph. principalis_), or Prince of Wales pheasant. It only differs from the last-named variety in its whiter wings, its maroon patch under the throat, the wide purple bars on the flanks, and in the orange-red upper tail coverts. Mr. Rothschild gives it a good character for importation, and those who have shot it at home speak of it as almost aquatic in habit, and not only able but willing to swim.

The Zorasthan pheasant, or _Phasianus zerasthanicus_, only differs slightly in marking from the above-named variety—that is to say, it has plain brown scapulars, and much narrower borders to the breast feathers.

The Yarkand pheasant, or _Ph. shawi_, differs from _colchicus_ in having a yellowish-brown rump and whitish wing coverts. Mr. Rothschild recommends its importation _viâ_ India for our English coverts.

The Siberian pheasant, or _Ph. tariminsis_, very closely resembles the last-named variety, but differs in the greenish rump and the buff wing coverts.

The Oxus pheasant, or _Ph. chrysomelas_, comes from Amu-Darya. It is distinguished for its general sandy-brown colour and the very broad green bars on all feathers of the under side of the body.

The Mongolian pheasant has been introduced largely by reason of Mr. Rothschild’s recommendation. It is known from all the others by the rich red of the flanks, the green gloss of the plumage, the very broad white neck ring and white wings. It is a very large bird. There is one point on which it is open to doubt whether this bird has not met more than its meed of praise. It is considerably heavier than the common pheasant, and is said to fly better. But the last statement is a little difficult to accept, for the bird is not like the Reeves pheasant, different in feathers, structure, and proportion of wing to weight. It is merely a very big common pheasant differently coloured and having everything in true proportion. It ought therefore, by reason of its weight, to fly worse than lighter birds. For big birds to fly as fast as small ones they require not only the same proportionate wing power and space, but greater.

Stone’s pheasant, or _Ph. elegans_, is almost a green bird, like versicolor, except upon the flanks and shoulders. It is not well known.

The pheasant of Tibet, or _Ph. vlangalii_, is pale sandy on the upper parts, and has golden-buff flanks.

Perjvalsky’s pheasant, or _Ph. strauchi_, differs from Stone’s pheasant by its orange-red flanks instead of the dark-green and the dark-red scapulars with light buff centres. It is recommended for introduction without much hope of attainment. Its home is Gansu.

The West Chinese pheasant differs from the ring-necked Chinese bird by the absence of a ring of white; its scientific name is _Ph. decollatus_.

The ring-necked pheasant, or _Ph. torquatus_, was introduced from China to St. Helena about 1513 A.D. In England its first introduction is unrecorded, but it exists here no longer in a pure state. It is flourishing in New Zealand, and also in America. In some of the States, including Oregon, it has bred so largely as to be a positive nuisance to agriculture.

Two more pheasants, only slightly differing from the ring-necked bird of China, are _Ph. formosanus_ and _Ph. satchennensis_.

The Japanese pheasant, or _Ph. versicolor_, is a beautiful bird with a dark-green breast. It was introduced by Lord Derby in 1840, and although the early crosses were no doubt large and beautiful, in the natural course of things, when colours came to blend, as they do not at first, a mongrel coloration would have been certain had not the crossing been so limited as to make no difference.

Of these 17 true type pheasants it is usual only to take account of the cocks. In the above not a word has been said of the equally important hens, that are practically all alike, which is additional proof that these are not species, and are only local varieties, breeding a little less true to colour than the varieties of fancy pigeons and fancy fowls.

The golden pheasant is not of the same genus as those above, but is closely allied to Lady Amherst’s pheasant. The former does not do for a covert bird, because it kills the much bigger common pheasant. The silver pheasant belongs to another genus, and also is barred from the coverts in consequence of its greater superiority in fight than in flight.

PHEASANTS

It is not certain whether pheasants are indigenous to this country. It is known that they were cultivated by the Romans as domesticated, or semi-domesticated birds, and as remains of pheasants have been found in towns or camps of the Romans in Britain, it is assumed that those people introduced the birds into Britain. It will be observed that the idea rests upon the fact that the pheasants were not indigenous to Italy. But Italy is to Europe what India is to Asia, the most southerly country, and pheasants do not like low latitudes. The races of pheasant most allied to our own cross bred are found from Asia Minor right across the Continent to Japan, and it is quite possible that the Western race extended across Central Europe to England. Obviously a strip of ocean is no bar in Asia, and it is not likely to have been so in Europe, especially as it is said that once the ocean did not flow between Britain and the Continent. The first feast of English pheasants mentioned in history occurred in the time of King Harold. The old English pheasant, as we must call the bird which preceded by 1000 or 2000 or as many million years the introduction of the Chinese race into England, was a red bird upon the back and the upper tail coverts, and it had no white ring round its neck. The Chinese pheasant, on the other hand, had the band of white and greenish colouring on the back and upper tail coverts, and what we have done by mixing green and red together is precisely what an artist does with those two colours. He produces some shade of neutral tint. Consequently, our cock pheasants are only handsome from coloration in regard to the necks and heads and the breasts, which the crossing has not damaged. The present desire to cross with birds that have white wing coverts, namely the Mongolian race, is liable to mix colours very much more. However beautiful a pure white may be and is, it has a very bad effect on the colours of fowls and ducks. White crossing has produced barndoor fowls of every hideous mixture, and the farm-pond duck with its washed-out feathering, which when compared with that of the Rouen and the wild duck suffers by the contrast. The Prince of Wales pheasant, the Mongolian, and even the Japanese versicolor pheasants, are handsome birds, and may be desirable as pure races, but any intermixtures of blood can only take place with the risk of spoiling the glory of the cock pheasant’s plumage. The same remark may be applied to crosses with the Reeves pheasant, which are much more difficult to bring about, because the cross-bred birds only appear to come to maturity in their third year, so that there is little danger; for sportsmen want early maturity before all things in the pheasant pens and coverts, where an immature cock bird would spell disaster.

The system of penning pheasants as we employ it came to us from France; without its aid we never should have succeeded in making the enormous bags that are now the fashion. One thousand birds in the day are now more often killed than 50 were a hundred years ago, and there are some places where the host tries to quadruple the 1000, and nearly succeeds. But the author finds that the general opinion is that 1000 really tall, fast birds is enough for anybody, and that when more are killed, and especially when great numbers are desired, the birds are not usually driven in a fashion to afford those difficult marks that are above all desired by both bad and good marksmen.

The general way of starting to preserve pheasants is to buy eggs from game farmers. The usual price is from £5 to 10s. a hundred, according to the time of year. The early eggs are much the most valuable, and for them is the most demand. But eggs early in April run many risks that those of early May escape. That is to say, the eggs may be frosted in the pens, and the chicks may suffer from a combination of cold and wet, when either one or the other alone would not injure. At the same time, it is always unwise to set up theory when nature is offering us free education. The survival of the fittest has evolved a bird that begins to lay generally about the 7th or 14th of April; that begins to incubate from about May 1st to the 7th, and to hatch out from about May 24th to 1st of June. Obviously this is because birds hatched much later than this have died out in natural surroundings, probably from being unable to stand our winters in their immature state of plumage. No doubt, also, eggs laid much before the earlier date have not produced chicks in sufficient numbers to alter the habits of the birds. Various kinds of forcing can be made to extend the breeding period at both ends, but there is a desire to increase the number of pheasants reared by their own mothers in the wild state, and there is every reason to believe that forcing of any sort would reduce the proportion of hen pheasants capable of raising a good brood in the open fields. They are not very successful, and the reason that has generally been accepted is that they are bad mothers, and go wandering aimlessly on as long as a single chick is left to follow. As a matter of fact this is not the reason. The young partridges and wild ducks in the rearing-fields leave the coops and hunt for food in broods, but the young pheasant hunts, or rather wanders, each for itself, careless of the presence of its fellows. This is how it happens that in the wild state the hen pheasant cannot shepherd her chicks. She cannot, like them, be everywhere at once. So the thunderstorm finds many young unprotected by the mother’s wing; the hawks and the crows have no mother to beat off before they can dine on young pheasants, which they have only to find alone in order to kill with ease. But the worst enemy to young pheasants is long wet ground vegetation. They have to run about in it to get their natural food, and if it were not for the frequent recurrence of the mother’s brooding wing they would perish of cold. In the rearing-fields the constant changes of young birds from one coop and foster-mother to another show how often death would overtake the lost birds were there not a house of call at every few yards. Obviously any cross bred that has the instinct to hunt for food in broods or collectively, and not in units, would greatly assist in the spread and increase of wild reared birds. In the absence of any such sort, improvement only seems to be possible by means of natural selection, or the survival of the birds that do not get lost in the wet herbage, and in breeding from them in preference to those that have been reared by hand. But land varies so much, that large broods, say, at Euston in Suffolk, would not prove that the same birds could have reared a brood in the clays of Buckinghamshire or Middlesex. Sandy soil is much the best for game, not only because water does not stand on the soil, but because for some reason the vegetation dries up so quickly after a wetting. It is not the wet that falls on the chick’s back that does the damage, but that which he brushes from the grass as he walks through it.

All questions of colour would have to give way before any difference of habits that would make rearing easier than it is. There is no reason why pheasants should cost more to rear than wild ducks and farmyard chickens, except that they are more delicate. Instead of being fed upon meal of kinds, they have to be supplied with hard-boiled egg, new-milk custard made with egg, or flesh, or blood, in their early stages. Breadcrumbs supply all the early necessities of the barndoor fowl, and the farther we go in pampering the farther we shall have to go. The farm poultry in wild nature lived greatly upon insects, just as the wild pheasant does now. It is to make up for the absence of insects that so much nitrogenous food is given to the pheasant chick, but as none is supplied to the domestic poultry it appears likely that pheasants kept as poultry are now reared would in a few generations become as hardy and easy, because those that could not stand it would die out. A race of pheasants entirely meal-fed would be of the greatest possible value.

Doubtless the losses at first would be heavy, for the pheasant in nature lives neither on corn nor seeds in its early life. When it is hatched in June, all the seeds of the previous year have grown into plants, and none of that year’s plants will have ripe seeds for a month or more. So that when theorists tell gamekeepers that they should give canary seed, and thus return to a state of natural management, they are advising the most unnatural management possible; but, all the same, a very convenient one, if it could be done.

The present most accepted method of feeding hand-reared pheasants is to start them on finely grated hard-boiled egg or custard; in the second stage, to give the latter mixed with fine-ground dry meal, in order to stiffen the custard and render it capable of crumbling. From this stage the birds go on by degrees to receive more meal and less custard, until the time comes to feed them upon boiled oatmeal and boiled rice, as the state of their bowels require a slight alterative. The oatmeal is relaxing, and the rice just the reverse. From this point to crushed wheat is a long jump, because the latter is not boiled and the two former are. However, to make the consistency of the boiled food more breakable and less sticky, fine flour or oatmeal uncooked will for some time have been shaken into it as the cooked food is pressed through a fine-mesh metal sieve. The object of this is to prevent the food having a stick-jaw tendency, and thus remaining and drying upon the beaks, backs, and legs of the birds. The usual practice is to place the food upon a board for the chicks and to wash the board frequently. There is a possibility that a quick way of spreading disease, when once it exists on the rearing-field, is to throw about food on the ground. There it mixes with the excreta of the birds, and is a possible although unproved source of contamination. Dr. Klein proved that fowl enteritis was spread in that manner, and perhaps pheasants take their well-known disease in the same way; but this has never been investigated by a bacteriologist, and the constant assertions that pheasant enteric is the same disease as fowl enteritis is no more than a guess, and one that is very unlikely to be correct. If it were so, the foster-mothers would be sure to die when the pheasant chicks take the enteric disease and die off in large numbers: only one authentic case of the foster-mothers having died from fowl enteritis has been reported. Then the chicks remained healthy. Fowls nearly always remain healthy when 50 per cent. of the pheasants die off. The foster-mothers in the coops will require water, and it should be boiled water given cold. It is not possible to leave water in the pans and prevent the young birds drinking it, so that every precaution has to be taken that the water does not introduce disease. But the chicks will not require much other liquid than that contained in their cooked food. A large proportion of the food given after the first fortnight should be green vegetable, given cooked or raw, according to the quality, or both, according to the appreciation of it by the birds. Green food and insects are natural pheasant foods in the summer, when the birds are young, and there is no reason why they should be deprived of one because they cannot get the other. Enormous numbers of insects are always in the trees of the coverts, and it was a habit of James Mayes, when keeper to the late Maharajah Duleep Singh, to remove his birds into covert the instant they began to look ill. He told the author that he saved them by this means, and as mature and immature insects drop in numbers from the trees probably the change back to natural feeding recovered the lost condition.

Of course pheasants will eat ants’ eggs greedily; they would probably grow healthy and strong on this food alone, just as partridges will. But the insects do not exist in sufficient numbers to feed as many pheasants as are reared. Whether some few ants’ eggs might be safely given to pheasants the author does not know, but partridges must either be wholly or not at all fed upon them. The birds will not look at anything else if they can get some ants’ eggs, although the numbers are not enough to keep them. It is usual to try to do without this food, and only to employ it in case birds are off their feed and require a “pick-me-up.” Young sparrows will feed upon the ants themselves, but small partridges only take the eggs. This causes much more of the food to be required, and although it is generally free food, the labour necessary to get enough makes the free food very much the most expensive.

The kind of pheasant pen required for the birds to winter in is a large one—the larger the better. The number of birds wintering in it must be left to the judgment of the individual. It should be of grass, and so large that the birds’ constant treadings do not destroy the growth. A level piece of ground without shelter is to be avoided. Dry banks, bushes, and basking and dusting mounds, as well as a heap of grit, are desirable.

Some people have had good results by leaving the birds in a pen of this sort to lay, and have found that a number of cocks amongst five times as many hens have not destroyed all chances of success by their fighting. But the usual plan is to make small pens large enough for each to contain five hens and a cock. Pens of 4 yards by 10, and 6 feet high, made of wire netting, are big enough, but they cannot be too large for the health of the birds, and as they last many years without removal, if the ground is dug up and limed at the end of each laying season, the expense of the first building is spread over fifteen or twenty years.

These pens are most cheaply made in close contact, for then two of the sides will serve a double purpose, for each will be a boundary for two pens. For 3 feet upwards from the ground the pens should either be turfed or made of corrugated iron, in order to afford shelter and prevent war with neighbours.

Another kind of laying pen most approved of late years, although success came before its invention, is that of the movable pen. These pens need not be more than a couple of feet high, but they have to be covered over, whereas if the birds have one wing brailed this is not necessary with the other kind of pen. Full-winged pheasants damage themselves seriously by flying against the wire netting roof of a pen, and even when roofs are made of string netting the shock birds receive on impact must be nearly as bad as those that kill netted grouse upon the same kind of netting. The object of these small light movable pens is to give the birds fresh ground every day. But the moving must be an enormous undertaking where many pheasants are kept, and it is conceivable that those who sell half a million eggs in the year, and want 5000 pens for the purpose, do not move them very often.