The Roosting Habit
If one thing annoys a keeper more than another, it is to have foxes turned down on his beat without warning. It is bad enough that foxes should be turned down at all—especially before the young pheasants have learned the trick of going into the trees to roost. Most of the pheasants living in and about the woods should go to roost by the middle of August, and only late birds may be excused if they have not acquired the roosting habit by the First. In the past the keeper was relieved of a load of anxiety if all his hand-reared birds went to tree by the First—for with the long days spent in the partridge fields he was unable to watch over his pheasants at night. But in these days, when there is so little partridge shooting in early September, the keeper has more time to give to his pheasants, and his anxieties are less, though he is always glad when his birds take to roosting out of the reach of vermin, especially of foxes—tame or wild.
Given a fair chance young pheasants soon learn to go to a perch to sleep. Where one sets a good example, others quickly follow. We remember a partridge that was reared with pheasants, and learned to go with them regularly to roost. Five-weeks-old pheasants will flutter up to roost on the first night after removal to covert. It is less difficult to induce them to seek a perch than to break them of the habit of sleeping on the ground. Pheasants have an eye rather for comfortable sleeping quarters than safe ones. Many a keeper has suffered heavy loss from putting his birds in a covert with a thick grassy undergrowth, or within reach of a field of rough grass, or a young plantation with a thick growth of rank herbage and attractive weeds. There the fox is most likely to come.
Ideal quarters for the birds, when the time comes to shift them from the rearing-field to the coverts, is ground bare of brambles, fern, and grass, where oak saplings throw out horizontal branches—not too thick—a few feet from the ground. With his young birds in such a place, the keeper may lie on his bed in peace and thankfulness—to dream of the harvest of his toil, a harvest which needs but a fine November day and straight powder to be garnered in abundance. Where the ground is unfavourable the keeper will try to teach his birds the roosting habit; one plan is to put the hen and her coop on a raised platform. This lessens any risk the hen may have to run from vermin, and encourages her brood to fly to the roost.
