A Gamekeeper's Note-book

by Owen Jones; Marcus Woodward

"Mothering" is the factor which makes all the difference between a moderately good and a very good season for young pheasants. A hen pheasant, when her chicks are quite small, can easily give warmth and shelter to a dozen or more; after the first week or so some have to go without, and unless the weather is fine and warm, they perish before they are covered by body feathers. Weather conditions that have had a bad effect on partridges may have little effect on pheasants. Many suppose that if partridges have suffered from drought, pheasants, especially wild ones, must have suffered also. But wild pheasants have an advantage in several ways. The period during which they lay and hatch their eggs and rear their young is much longer than with partridges. If the last ten days of June be days of cold, heavy, ceaseless rain, they may practically annihilate the partridge chicks. But at that time a great number of young pheasants are old enough to withstand a considerable rainfall. Nor are the pheasants of tender age—only a section of the pheasant crop—so much at the mercy of bad weather as are tender partridges, for their haunts are chiefly in and about the woods and hedgerows, which afford shelter from cold and wet. In times of drought, the pheasants have the best chance of finding, among the shaded herbage, and beneath the masses of decaying leaves, enough moist insect food to carry them over to better days. It is on account of the better insect-supply in moist places that in very thin partridge seasons, where birds have suffered heavily from drought in open places, a few fine coveys may often be found on the fringes of woods. And in very wet seasons, the shelter and warmth of underwood also explain the survival of strong coveys. The end of September marks the time of the breaking-up of the pheasant broods. The young birds no longer remain with their mothers; the young cocks begin to feel self-conscious and gallant in their fine feathers, growing richer daily, and duels are fought as by way of practice for the fierce struggles of their first spring. You may hear at the roosting-time of the birds the crude efforts of the young cocks to say "cock-up" instead of "peep-peep." Their utterances are an inharmonious blending of treble and bass; indeed old pheasant cocks and the birds of the year are as different in voice as grown men and choir-boys, old rooks and young.

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.

The Badger's Stealth

A badger may come to a neighbourhood and stay for a long while unnoticed. He prowls at night, unseen and unsuspected, and people may suppose there is no badger within miles. In the same way otters are at home in many a stream where nobody dreams there is an otter in the neighbourhood. But let the badger's presence be discovered, and he will be persecuted to the end. The wise badger shifts his tent at once if a human nose is poked into it; all badgers would profit if they went to the fox for a few wrinkles. The foxes have a maxim: Never be at home to callers who may come again. A visiting-card, in the shape of a particle of scent, is more than enough acquaintance for a fox with a human being.

Even the gamekeeper often harbours a badger unknowingly. What he does not suspect he does not look for. And if he were to look for a month for signs of a badger he might never find one. Again and again he might pass within sight of a badger's holt, and think it to be the retreat of a fox. But by chance he might come upon a clear imprint of a badger's tracks, and after that it would not take him long to discover the badger's lair. While not a friend of the badger, he has no such bitter resentment against him as he feels for the fox. If it were not that the badger every now and then commits an outrage that brings disgrace on himself and all his kith and kin, the record of his life might be written down as fairly harmless. In these days the badger can make small claim as a provider of sport, which might mitigate the sentence most keepers pass upon him.