The Complete English Wing Shot

by George Teasdale Teasdale-Buckell

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.