The Complete English Wing Shot

by George Teasdale Teasdale-Buckell

It is questionable whether the cocks go to the hens as much as is believed. In the author’s experience of pheasants, it has been the hens that have been attracted by the crowing of the cocks. He has known newly established laying pens to draw hen pheasants in numbers to ground that they never before nested upon. Whether they would have entered the pens if they had been open at the top is doubtful, but many of them laid outside and had infertile eggs. After all, what is the crow given to the cock for if he cannot make any use of it?

There is some difference of opinion as to whether most success follows the incubation of pen produced or of wood produced eggs.

This is only to be answered with reservations. There is no doubt that 90 per cent. of fairly early eggs from well kept penned birds will be fertile. There are two reasons against as large a proportion from home covert birds. First, the latter are picked up less often, and run more risk from night frosts. Second, you may leave a large proportion of cocks and yet lose most of them by their straying off for miles with favourite hens.

Mr. Tegetmeier, in his book on Pheasants, has collected evidence from all quarters, and he gives many good reasons for not reducing the cocks below a proportion of one to three hens. Mr. Millard has lately expressed very strong views against leaving fewer than eight hens to one wild cock. But perhaps Mr. Millard’s life, in connection with game-meal, is not precisely that which would endow him with the most reliable information from all directions. Be this as it may, it is within the experience of the author that when one cock to five hens has been his accomplished aim, he has had the satisfaction of seeing straying pheasants in every part of an estate all breeding good broods, but the disappointment of knowing that every cock had left the home covert and that many hens were laying infertile eggs there. Probably there are limits to the distance a hen bird will go to the crow of a cock. Here was a case in which not one egg per cent. was good in the covert, but out in the fields a mile or two away it was quite different. Every egg was fertile and produced its chick.

The coverts are not really natural places for pheasants to lay in, any more than they are for partridges. Generally, when pheasants begin to lay the fields have too little covert to tempt them to make nests in the open. Then they resort to the hedgerows, and when these are scarce, as they are in the stone wall districts, many more birds lay in the coverts than would do so if there was vegetation outside. However, in a stone wall and partridge country, the author has seen as many pheasants’ as partridges’ nests mown out of the Italian rye grass and clover-fields. But these were late birds, because this mowing rarely begins before June 15th, and many pheasants have hatched out before then. If it could be planned that all the pheasants left could be prevented from straying, then fewer cocks would possibly do, and this might occur in a grass country. But in a corn district the birds will stray, and when half the cocks have departed, as they will with one or two hens to each, those left would not have the proportion of hens aimed at; but where three hens were attempted to be left to each cock, and two of them went away with each of half the males, the other males left behind would have four hens each; where five hens were designed, the real proportion in the cover would be eight hens to a cock; and where the design was to leave eight hens, the real proportion would be fourteen hens to a cock after the strayers had left in similar proportions.

It may be replied that keepers should prevent straying, but, on the contrary, it is just what is wanted, and it has come to be the best and most fashionable preservation to encourage it.

Those who know best act in the belief that every cock pheasant that gets away with one or two hens will become the sire of one or two good broods, and they know, too, that those that remain with many more in coverts have not the breeding instinct fully developed, and that if they have chicks the competition for natural food will be too great for the welfare of any. In other words, the old birds will eat up the insect life before the chicks come.

Pheasant preservers have in their minds the preservation at Lord Leicester’s, at Holkham, in Norfolk; that also at Euston, the Duke of Grafton’s, in Suffolk; that at Beaulieu, in Hampshire, and have become aware that with proper encouragement on suitable land the wild reared pheasant is enough of itself, and on any land a great assistance to the game stock.

The most noted success has occurred at Euston, where about 6000 wild pheasants have been shot in a season. This is the most noted, because the system adopted there advanced game preserving in general by one step.

The advance occurred in this way. When the Duke of Grafton succeeded to the property, he told Blacker the keeper to stop the hand rearing of pheasants. The keeper, however, begged for, and obtained, a compromise. This was, that he might have hens under which to place eggs removed from pheasants’ nests in danger, until he could find other pheasants’ nests in which to place them. It has resulted, in practice, in keeping eggs until the shell-chipping stage under the domestic hens, and then in placing them under pheasants having their own eggs in the same state of incubation. This has succeeded in producing big hatchings of pheasants, many more than the birds would lay eggs in the ordinary course. But the Duke of Grafton has denied that bad or dummy eggs have been used at Euston, and consequently, although Blacker pointed the way, he did not consummate the latest phase of pheasant preservation, in which all the birds’ eggs are removed as laid, and are incubated under hens, while the female pheasant is kept sitting on “clear” eggs, in order to be ready to take a big batch of chipped eggs as soon as they are ready.