With nature and a camera

Chapter IV. Gamekeepers: their friends and foes

Pheasant rearing *

Pheasant rearing is the most important business of a woodland gamekeeper's life. The eggs are gathered from hedgebanks and woods and placed under barn-door fowls in hatching-boxes, which are all numbered and dated on the lid or door, so that the keeper in charge can tell when the chicks are due to appear. The picture below, representing a pheasant hatchery, was obtained on one of the largest and best preserved mixed game estates in England. In front of the hatching-boxes was a double row of wooden pegs driven into the ground, to each of which was attached a piece of string with a running noose at the end. When the fowls were taken off the nests to be fed the noose was slipped over one foot, and the string being so arranged in regard to length as to prevent one bird from interfering with another, quarrelling and stealing each other's food were effectually avoided.

A quantity of food, also a dish containing a supply of fresh water, were placed beside each peg. Seventeen pheasants' eggs are placed under an average-sized hen, and the keeper who sees fifteen chicks out of this number is well pleased. A dry, hot season is considered worse than a warm damp one for hatching purposes, and during the prevalence of the former kind of weather the eggs are slightly sprinkled with water whilst the hen is off feeding. In spite, however, of this helpful precaution many chicks die in their shells, apparently without the necessary strength to break forth. In addition to dogs chained up at different points, this hatchery was encircled by a fine copper wire, placed about a couple of feet from the ground and attached to the trigger of an alarm gun affixed to the windowsill of the keeper's sleeping-room, from which he could instantly bolt after any prowling egg-stealer.

Pheasants' eggs vary considerably in intensity of coloration. Lord Walsingham's head-keeper told me that stiff clay land on which pheasants feed produces dark-coloured eggs, and a light, sandy soil pale-coloured ones, and this contention he certainly supported by several instances which he brought under my notice, although other keepers to whom I have mentioned the circumstance have no faith in its accuracy.

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Pheasant hatchery

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One of the most marvellous provisions of Nature for the protection of a bird during a vitally important period of its history is the one first pointed out by Mr Tegetmeier of the Field, a veteran pheasant-rearing authority. He discovered that whilst a hen pheasant is sitting on her eggs in a wild state the natural scent thrown off her body at all other seasons of the year has the course of its travels reversed from outwards to inwards, and passes away with the excreta, thus rendering the bird's chances of discovery by a prowling enemy materially less.

When young pheasants are hatched off they are placed out in a clean field in coops, along with their foster-mothers, and watched night and day by the keepers in charge. In spite of this, however, they are sometimes stolen, and I know one keeper in the Home Counties who had nearly all his young birds taken away in a single night, although they were being guarded by two watchers, who had unfortunately had too much beer and gone to sleep, and a retriever dog.

Pheasant on nest