THEY ARE NOT HELPLESS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 25, 30 January 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

THEY ARE NOT HELPLESS.

YOUNG PHEASANTS.

By E. G. TURBOTT. B.Sc.

THERE are many ways of looking at pheasants, and it is very common to sight them over the barrels of a gun. The cock pheasant, of course, looks very beautiful, but at the present time pheasant life has to show something of greater beauty still in the young birds which are so fascinatingly precocious in leaving their nest. Actually "precocial" is a correct scientific term for the young of any kind of bird which leave the egghouse or nest without a stay of any length in it. They stand in sharp contrast to those helpless, and often extremely ugly, youngsters which ask a lot of care from their father and mother before leaving the "shelter." Tiny pheasants, then, as any farmer will tell you with his eye twinkling, will run hither and thither with pieces of egg shell still on their backs, almost. The life story starts with a clutch of six to fourteen cream-brown eggs well hidden by a bird which knows how to make a survey of the ground.

In one of tliese pictures tlie hen must l.ave been fascinated by the depth and thickness of the grass in a liav paddock. I learnt of the nest when the time for mowing came. We left an islet of round the place, and, in spite of inv photographing and the hav-making operations, I have goon reason for believing that the eggs hatched and young birds flourished. Xot so t lie other nest here pictured. It was found in a fairly isolated little clump of fern in a rather rough field. Unfortunately, as

it turned out, it was also below the level of the clay road nearby. Somewhere about Christmas time came a typical sudden North Auckland rainstorm and freshet, with torrents of water overflowing from every roadside gutter. I went to look up the nest in the fern clump after the rain, when every hillside was brilliant in its damp colours, but I found that only damage had taken place there. The eggs three-quarters buried in a mass of clay silt washed from the road; they were cold and dead, beyond all hope of ever producing a brood. No doubt another

attempt at nesting was immediately made, although since tlie rook will have nothing to do with nest-making' or brooding, the hen may have had to find another mate. Ihe pheasant's nest is, of course, tlie same simple hollow, with a few leaves, in which the ordinary domestie hen likes to lay her eggs if she has a chance. The fowl and the pheasant are actually members of the same order of birds. "Pheasants," save J. Arthur Thomson, "are aristocrats among fowls, winning our esteem by their decorative handsomeness rather than by their brains or liy any force of character." The hen, whose colour blernls marvellously with the grass or fern round the nest, has to sit on tlie eirgs for 24 to 2<i days. Then the chicks are well cared for, perhaps even more than they really need. Thev begin to roost on the Bamo tree as the mother when only half-grown, and run and mock-fight about orchard or waste land as thev joyfully grow up. ( iiirken-like as they are. these young pheasants never become tame, even when reared by domestic hens in ■oops. They come for their food in a timid and nervous manner, and become quite wild as they grow older.