Old Hens
In the gamekeeper's eyes a hen pheasant becomes an old hen when she enters upon her second nesting season. But all cock pheasants are old birds when they have seen their first Christmas—only seven or eight months having passed over their glossy, green heads. With the New Year the youngest of the cocks is old in craft, guile and cunning, and all the keeper's skill is taxed to checkmate his endless ways of escape. A beat of the wood has no sooner started than all the birds depart to the point farthest from the beaters.
A Gamekeeping Problem
When catching up pheasants for the laying-pens, there is always the difficulty of preventing their escape from the wire-net enclosures, and it is interesting to see the different devices by which this trouble is met. The enclosure must not be covered over with wire-netting, for the birds, whenever startled, would fly upwards and injure themselves—and it is wonderful with what perseverance a pheasant will fly up again and again, until its pate has no skin left, and sometimes until it can fly up no more. So the keeper sometimes covers the enclosure with string netting, small enough to prevent the birds escaping, and large enough to prevent them catching their heads and hanging themselves. Others follow the hawker's system, called brailing, attaching Y-shaped pieces of leather to one wing so that it cannot be opened for flight—or the wing may be tied with a piece of tape. The wings are treated in this way in turn, lest one should grow stiff through having no work.
Pheasants bred simply for stocking purposes are pinioned when small birds, as are wild duck; but this reduces their value when their egg-laying days are numbered. Some keepers cut the flight feathers of one wing, but the birds cannot then fly again until the shortened quills have moulted and new ones have grown. But a bird whose flight feathers have been pulled out in the spring will grow fresh ones by June, when she is turned out of the pen. At this time the bird with cut wings is at a heavy disadvantage, alike in escaping the dangers and in mothering any brood she may succeed in hatching out in the woods.
How shall a pheasant gather her chicks beneath her wings if she have only a wing and a half?