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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