The twenty-fifth day of April is one of the keeper's high days. A large
number of the twenty or thirty thousand gamekeepers in this country
then commit their first batches of pheasant eggs to the care of broody
hens. Some keepers cling to this date because their fathers did so
before them, in the same way that ancestral etiquette decrees that on
a certain fair-day cabbage seed must be sown. No decided advantage is
to be gained by very early hatching; but by April 25 the keeper usually
has a goodly collection of eggs, taken from wild birds' nests, and
their quality does not improve if kept, in an artificial way, longer
than a fortnight. Eyes ignorant of woodcraft would pass a pheasant's
nest which no keeper could fail to see; and would pass unseeingly over
the brown form of the sitting bird, heedless of the bright, dark eyes
that keenly watch the intruder's movements. Pheasants like a little
light cover, but do not care to nest in thick and tangled undergrowth.
They love sunshine, and prefer a site where falls a shaft of the
morning sun; if you note the position of a sitting pheasant, you will
probably find that her face is sunwards. The mother bird is very
jealous of the sanctity of her nest; if disturbed she does not often
return. The keeper, passing by a sitting pheasant, passes by as though
he had seen nothing.
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