Nature's Laws
Yet it is hardly fair to compare pheasants to partridges. The difference in their habits of life makes it necessary that partridges should learn to use their wings more quickly than pheasants. They will fly when no larger than starlings, but pheasants grow as big as full-grown partridges before making much use of their wings. Partridges mature the more quickly: hatched in mid-June they are nearly full grown by September, while pheasants, born in May, are still in their baby stage in October. Then the habit of the partridges to roost in coveys on the ground fosters the instinct to spring into the air and fly on the first sign of danger, all in a covey acting as one bird for mutual protection. There is some little excuse for the young pheasants that butt into wire with such foolish persistency—they are so near to the wire that their legs have no chance to launch them fairly into the air. While the desire of a pheasant, on meeting wire outside a wood, is to pass through into the covert, the idea of the partridge is to turn about, and fly back to the fields whence it came. The effect of a line of wire-netting on wild creatures seems to be that they imagine they are enclosed on all sides. A half-grown leveret cantered before us for quite two miles alongside netting to the left of him; only after covering this distance did it seem to dawn upon him that by turning to the right he might go his way to freedom.
