Pheasant Shooting - With Chapters on Planning Large and Small Covert Shoots, Notes on Successful Shoots in England and Help to Choose the Correct Gun

By Anon

This book contains a comprehensive guide to the hunting of pheasants in Britain. Containing all the information needed for successful pheasant hunting, this text is of great value to anyone with an interest in this sport and constitutes a must-have addition to discerning collections of British hunting literature. Concise yet detailed, this antique text contains timeless information sure to be of interest to both the amateur and seasoned hunter alike. The chapters of this book include: 'Pheasants', 'Planning a Covert Shoot', 'The Covert Shoot', 'A Covert Shoot in Devon in 1910', 'A Covert Shoot in Hampshire in 1934', 'Preservation', 'Shooting Operations', and 'On the Choice and Fit of a Gun'. This text has been elected for modern republication due to its educational value, and we are proud to republish it here complete with a new introduction on shooting wildfowl.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Country Books
• Release date: Sep 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781528764445

Book preview

PHEASANTS.

EVEN more closely associated than the Grouse with August and the Partridge with September is the Pheasant with Ocober, though as a matter of fac there are fewer pheasants shot in Ocober than in any of the three following months. It is almost impossible to use or hear or see the word Ocober without visions of pheasants rising before one. In our earliest years, long perhaps before we had ever seen a live pheasant, and were only familiar with it in the picure books of the nursery, we knew the old rhyme which told us that

Mild October brings the pheasant.

Yes, mild and soft and soothing is the autumn time, the pleasantest of the whole year. Aristotle says that the old prefer the spring to the autumn, because the former revives hope in their breasts, and is suggestive of a resurrecion from the dead, whereas they are reminded by the latter of decay and death, and are not able to suppress the sad thoughts which are called up by the outward aspec of nature; but, with all due deference to such an authority, I am inclined to think that the old enjoy the autumn as much as the young or middle-aged. Even its fogs and mists are pleasant. Well does Keats call it the Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, as if its mists and vapours were a part of its beauty, as indeed they are, as they roll upward or disappear before the sun. At no time of the year are country rambles more delightful, whether we are searching for nuts, for mushrooms, or humble blackberries, or, gun in hand, beating up the haunts of the pheasant. It is now that the woods and hedgerow trees look their best, even on dull days, for, as Southey has well said:

O’er the leaves before they fall

Such hues has Nature thrown,

That the woods wear on sunless days

A sunlight of their own.

And as a poet of the people has sung:

Gorgeous are thy woods, October,

Clad in glowing mantle sere!

Brightest tints of beauty blending,

Like the west when day’s descending,

Thou’rt the sunset of the year.

We need no lecures on chromatology, or learned classification of leaf tints into Chloro, Xantho, Erythro, Chryso, and Phaio-Phylls, to be able to appreciate the autumnal beauty of the woodlands.

But I must remember that my business is with the pheasants first, and the autumn afterwards, or rather with the birds and not the season. Before, however, coming to closer quarters as it were with them, let me make some jottings about their history from both an antiquarian and an ornithological point of view.

The Phasianidæ belong to the Order of birds called by most naturalists the Gallinæ, but sometimes termed Rasores, or scrapers, from their habit of scratching the ground for their food. To the Family of the Phasianidœ belong the peacocks, the turkeys, the guinea fowls, and the various breeds of what we call domestic fowls; and the pheasant may be considered the type of the family. Our bird, named by naturalists Phasianus Colchicus, is, as its title implies, of foreign origin, and the old legend is that it was first brought from the banks of the river Phasis, in Colchis, to Europe by Jason of the Golden Fleece and his Argonauts; and thus we are at once relieved of any etymological difficulty as to the origin and meaning of the word pheasant. But without wishing to detrac uncharitably from the enterprise of the captain of the good ship Argo, it does not seem that the pheasant became thoroughly naturalised in Europe till about the middle of the thirteenth century. It was found, however, in this country earlier than this, though the acual date of its introducion may not be ascertainable. According to Mr. W. B. Dawkins, in a learned communication made some few years ago, the most ancient record of the existence of the pheasant in Great Britain is to be found in some manuscripts in the British Museum. In these manuscripts, of the twelfth century, edited and published in 1861 by Professor Stubbs, is the bill of fare drawn up by King Harold for the canons’ households of from six to seven persons, A.D. 1059, and of this bill of fare a pheasant (aut unus Phasianus) forms an item. The professor deems it very probable that as pheasants had become naturalised before the Norman invasion, and that as the English and Danes were not the introducers of strange animals, the longtails were introduced by the Romans, who naturalised the fallow deer in Britain. It is well known that pheasants were amongst the game found in England in the reign of Henry I. (1100—1135), and that a licence was necessary to kill them, as it is recorded that the Abbot of Amesbury obtained a licence during that reign for that purpose. It appears in Echard’s History of England (A.D. 1299), in the reign of Edward I., that they were marketable commodities then, and fetched 4d. each. Then, too, as now, they appear to have been a luxury, as a fat lamb realised no more, except from Christmas to Shrovetide. But perhaps we can go even further back than the date first mentioned. Camden, in his Britannia, gives us a copy of the Charter of Conveyance of the Keeping of the Dengie Hundred, in Essex, from Edward the Confessor, who came to the throne in 1041 or 1042, to Ralph Peverell. He says he extraced it from the King’s Record, in the Exchequer; and in it, among the game enumerated, we find fesant hen and fesant cocke. But, whatever be the date of its introducion among us, certain it is that it was brought from Georgia, the country lying between the Black and Caspian Seas; so that we cannot claim it as one of our original fauna.

The ring-necked pheasant (Phasianus torquatus), i.e., the variety pretty well known among us as distinguished by the ring of white feathers round its neck, was brought from China to Europe very many years ago. These pheasants are frequent in India and in the regions about the Caspian Sea. The species in China, which is smaller than the common pheasant, is considered by M. Temminck as a perfecly distinc one, and in this view he is supported by the fac that in that country it never mixes with the common pheasant. The pied pheasants, which are frequently shot in our coverts, are not a distinc variety, their peculiar feathering being probably attributable to some disease of the skin, a remark which applies also to white ones. I notice that in a paper read before the Linnæan Society, in February, 1880, that it is stated that the ring-necked birds seemed to thrive better in New Zealand than the common ones.

The habits of pheasants are well known to sportsmen and naturalists. They are polygamous, and the hens in their wild state lay from ten to fourteen eggs, which are hatched out towards the end of May or the beginning of June, the young pheasants thus coming into the world nearly a month before the young partridges. But the breeding of pheasants in their wild state cannot be depended on for supplying a sufficient stock for the preserves, so numerous are the causes which prevent the nides coming to perfecion. Hence the system almost universally adopted of obtaining the eggs from birds kept in pheasantries, and setting them under domestic fowls, and rearing them by hand, as it is called, afterwards.

The poets seem to have gone into raptures over the glorious plumage of the cock pheasant; and no wonder, for it is as beautiful as can well be imagined. Mary Howitt thus sings of the bird and his sylvan home among the birches:

Away, to the woods, with the silvery rind

And the emerald tresses afloat in the wind;

For ’tis joy to go to those sylvan bowers

When summer is rich with leaves and flowers,

And to see ’mid the growth of all lovely things

The joyous pheasant unfold his wings,

And then cower down, as if to screen

His gorgeous purple, gold, and green.

Oh beautiful bird, in thy stately pride,

Thou wast made in a waste of flowers to hide.

And to fling to the sun the glorious hues

Of thy rainbow gold, thy greens and blues!

Yes, beautiful pheasant, the birchwood bowers,

Rich many-formed leaves, bright tinted flowers,

Broad masses of shade, and sunshine free,

In thy gorgeous beauty are meet for thee.

Truly a glorious bird is the Phasianus Colchicus, the common pheasant of the English preserves! And what so exciting to the sportsman as the whir-r-r-r of its quickly-expanded wings, as it rises heavily from the covert, and vainly seeks in flight that safety which the fern brake and leafy copse will no longer afford? There has the wild bred bird dwelt since first it chipped the shell, and came forth from the clear brown egg, a little downy creature, scarcely bigger than a sparrow, to follow its heedful mother hither and thither, and to be fed with such delicacies of the season as ants’ eggs, small caterpillars, grubs, and maggots, which she scratched out of the earth, or from amid the dead leaves, or picked out from the crevices of the old park palings or the decayed trunks of trees. The nest of the parent bird had been commenced when the bleak March winds were whistling through the nearly naked boughs, and January snows yet lay in white patches between the spreading roots of the gnarled oaks and towering elms, and in many a nook and hollow of the wide woodland. When the primrose buds were just beginning to show themselves, and a faint odour, like a promise and foretaste of delicious things to come, was wafted from the mossy violet beds; when all nature was listening for the first cry of the cuckoo, to tell that spring was really come; when now and then a solitary songster sent forth an interrupted strain, in preparation for the vernal chorus—then it was that the short, husky crow of the cock pheasant was heard in the woods, telling of love and rivalry; then the little brown hen fluttered and plumed her sober-coloured wings, and began to bestir herself and prepare for the maternal duties which she knew must ere long devolve upon her, and her alone; for her liege lord, to whose presence she was now invited, will take no share in them. Let us not despise the little brown hen. Let us not, as Jesse has it, when we see the male expanding his rich and varied plumage in the sunbeams, forget that on the female devolve all the offices of love and affecion. She hatches, feeds, and protecs at the risk of her life her helpless young ones; and what we may consider as lowering her in the scale of creation is, on the contrary, an ac of the greatest kindness and consideration. Her want of beauty is her chief protecion, and her humility saves her from a thousand perils. Thomas Miller, in his Beauties of the Country, gives the following picure of pheasant life: "What a lordly creature the pheasant looks,