Part 12

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The Old, Old story

The story of pheasant-rearing begins with the collection of eggs from wild nests and from penned birds. Then comes the collection of broody hens to play the part of foster-mother. Then the lime-washing of the nest-boxes. Hundreds of wooden boxes, each compartment measuring fifteen inches square, are placed in lines in a shed or an open field; the nests are roughly fashioned in the boxes, of turf and soil, moss, meadow-hay, and straw. And on the nests are set broody hens, beneath which, when they have proved their worthiness, are placed from fifteen to twenty eggs. Heaps of soaked corn and pans of water are made ready, and once a day the hens are lifted off their nests to be fed and watered, and to allow fresh air to play on the eggs. A rope runs on the ground before the boxes, and to this the hens are tethered. The keeper lifts off and tethers his hens at the rate of three or four to the minute.

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The Luck of Pheasant-rearing

Seventeen is the regulation number of pheasant eggs to be put beneath each hen, and seventeen chicks are put with each hen in the coops in the rearing-field. The most motherly hens are selected for service on the rearing-field. Less careful mothers are turned out when they have hatched the eggs, or, if they are willing, are supplied with another clutch. A hen that will hatch several clutches is too useful to be honoured with the task of bringing up a brood, and must be content to play the part of a living incubator. The keeper knows his hens through and through--and he can tell when a hen has chicks without seeing them, by the bristling of her feathers at his approach, and her instinctive clucking.

An incubator helps the keeper to cope with the whims and frailties of broody hens. It is always ready to receive those unexpected eggs which may be brought to his cottage at any moment, as when sitting birds are disturbed by sheep or cut out in the mowing grass. And it is ready to take charge of the eggs abandoned by a fowl, or the chipped eggs of a foster-mother which shows an inclination to crush the chicks as hatched. Yet it will be long before it ousts the broody barn-door hen from the rearing-field.

In the days before incubators, keepers who found themselves with more eggs than hens were forced to strange shifts. One keeper saved the situation with the help of ducks. Wild duck nested in numbers on an island in a lake, and one spring day he took six hundred pheasants' eggs to the island, exchanging them for the eggs of the sitting ducks. The ducks proved excellent sitters, but as his hens became available he would punt to the island to relieve the ducks of their charge. Pheasants were more prized in those days than wild duck. Such a sacrifice of duck for pheasants would be saved to-day by the ever-ready incubator.

While pheasant-rearing is chiefly a matter of skill, luck plays a part in success, and of course a light warm soil, a good situation, a good supply of natural food, and good weather make all the difference. If eighty eggs hatch out in a hundred this is considered good; if less than seventy hatch, this is bad. A keeper may congratulate himself if he turns a thousand pheasants into covert from fifteen hundred eggs set; anything below one bird turned into covert from two eggs is considered a poor result. Keepers believe that chicks cannot be hatched too late in May or too early in June.

After about twenty-four days the eggs hatch, and the little chicks are taken with the hens to coops placed in readiness in the rearing-field; a place so jealously guarded by the keeper as to be in his eyes sacred land. Four or five times daily the chicks must be fed--at first on eggs, to which is added later a mixture of biscuit-meal, rice, greaves, and small bird-seed, until boiled corn becomes the staple food. Every night the chicks must be shut carefully into their coops--a long and tiresome task. The danger of enteritis looms up--ten thousand chicks may be swept off in a week. When five or six weeks old, chicks, hens, and coops are carted away in waggons to the woods, where the chicks must face the dangers of vermin by night as well as by day until they learn to go to roost.

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From Egg to Larder

For the keeper the days and nights spent in his rearing-fields pass in incessant anxiety. He never counts his pheasants before they are hatched. He may count them as morsels of fluff; when they begin to use their babyish wings; again when they fill the broad ride with a mass of seething brown--but not until the bracken is dead, and the trees are naked, and the game-cart has borne away its burden, does he count them as his own. Nor does his anxiety cease until the long tails hang safely in his larder.

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Fine Eggs and Good Mothers

"They be a good lot of eggs," the keeper will inform you as he reveals his store, ready to be given to the quickening warmth of broody fowls. "I don't know as ever I set eyes on better," he will add, "and I don't expect you have neither." If you denied this he would not believe you. His pheasants' eggs are like the apple blossoms: each year more beautiful than ever. And the more plentiful the more beautiful. Noting the keeper, as he goes out in search of broody hens, you might mistake him for a dealer in rags and bones. He tramps all round the countryside with an old sack slung over his back--one of the light, thin kind in which dog-biscuits come; or sometimes he drives in a gig, and poultry-farmers welcome him gladly. He pays half a crown or three shillings for each hen in broody mood, and so helps to make poultry pay. His difficulty is to find broody hens at the time when he most needs them. The ideal is a healthy bird, not one with pallid comb or inclined to mope; she must be of medium size and of light weight, with short legs, small feet, and a wealth of downy feathers. Above all, she must be quiet in demeanour. The fidgety, fussy hen may have excellent intentions, but is likely to cause disaster to her eggs and chicks. A big hen with the sprawliest feet, but of gentle disposition, and slow to anger, will often prove a better foster-mother than one a model in form, feather, and feet, but in temperament a spitfire.

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The Cub-stealing Shepherd

Illicit traffic in fox-cubs and partridge eggs is hard to stamp out. So long as men will buy fox-cubs and eggs there will be men to supply them. If there were no buyers there would be middlemen, and there would be fewer cubs which bear the label, "From Germany." Cubs, wherever they come from, fetch a good price, giving ample profit for an hour's hard digging--say ten shillings each. Cub-snatching is less risky than egg-stealing. So far as we know, even to kill cubs is not an offence against the law, and so there can hardly be a penalty for taking them alive. The worst that could happen to the culprit would be a prosecution for simple trespass and damage. A cunning, rascally cub-stealer of our acquaintance was employed by none other than the local M.F.H. He was a shepherd, and nothing pleased him better than to hear that foxes were plentiful when hounds came his way. He knew that in the spring he would reap many pounds by cub-snatching, and with small risk of rousing suspicion. But one spring morning he was caught in the very act of cub-snatching, and then he ceased to be that Master's shepherd.

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Lures and Charms

The old-fashioned professional rat-catcher is seen as rarely as the mole-catcher, with his rude traps of wood, wire and string, actuated by a spring of green wood from the hedgerow. And with the rat-catcher have passed the secrets of his calling--how, when and where to use oils and essences to attract rats to their doom. He knew how to handle rats alive with his naked hands, and the trick of squeezing the life from their bodies. The experienced take rats by the back of the throat, but unless the grip is made in just the right way a dangerous bite may be received. The safest plan for the inexperienced is to take live rats by the tip end of their tails; then they are helpless, since their own weight keeps their heads down. Mice, treated in this way, would curl up and nip their captor's fingers in a twinkling. He was a deep character, the old rat-catcher. If there were many rats he would destroy many--but if few he would take good care to leave behind him some fine specimens for stock. No doubt the oils and preparations invented by himself, or handed down to him by his ancestors, would not only attract rats for his catching, but would attract others after he had gone, so that his trade was kept alive. Thus, perhaps, arose the old saying that if you kill one rat twelve friends will come to its funeral. Oils are still used as lures by the fish-poacher, and also by the gamekeeper. To draw rats into his traps the keeper sprinkles them with the sweet-scented oil of rhodium-wood and oil of aniseed. To attract cats he uses tincture of valerian; the essences in the root of that plant having so great a charm for cats that it will draw them from far and near. To attract stoats and weasels he uses oil of musk. To entice a fox, a dead cat is one of the best lures: many a fox, to our knowledge, has owed its death to an over-keenness in unearthing a cat that had been shot and lightly buried. We have heard that dog-stealers induce dogs to follow them by carrying a piece of wart from a horse's leg--we know a simpler plan. The keeper's woodcraft teaches him many ways to charm wild creatures to their destruction. A common trick to bring rabbits from their holes is to imitate the squeal of a rabbit in fear, by applying the lips to the back of the hand, and producing a tremulous sucking sound. Possibly the rabbits think that a brother is in distress, and come to see from curiosity.

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The Law and the Peewit

The eggs of plovers in some parts are now receiving protection all the year round, the Board of Agriculture having given notice that peewits feed wholly to the benefit of field crops and do no injury whatever to the interests of farmers. The greedy and the thoughtless have taken plovers' eggs in unreasonable numbers, and total protection is to be welcomed. It may be argued that peewits' eggs are a rare delicacy, and wholesome food; that where they may be taken a limited number of old men may earn a few shillings; that a law superior to find-and-take would be difficult to enforce; also that taking the eggs until about the middle of April does not materially affect the numbers of peewits. What with the effects of frosts and the destruction of eggs during the tillage of fields, such as harrowing the fallows and rolling the grass and cornfields, where peewits mostly nest, the greater portion of the first layings cannot in any case survive. But those allowed to take eggs for the sake of profit will not stop at early ones, and peewits are such useful birds that thorough protection for all the eggs would be the best policy.

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The Partridge and the Peewit

The partridge and the peewit seem to lead almost blameless lives. We could claim that the productive value of land is improved by the presence of partridges and peewits. There is no end to the good work of partridges. Even when they devour grain, they are innocent of doing harm, for they eat only such grain as is shed on the stubbles--waste grain which none could grudge them. They never seek out grain newly sown, like the rooks. When a field has been harrowed, directly the men and horses have gone, the partridges gather in numbers to feed, and though they may come after the field has been sown, they come as readily before, as it is not the grain, but the slugs, grubs, worms, and insects they are seeking; bits of weeds and their seeds, aphides, earwigs, and ants' eggs are eagerly devoured.