A Partridge Preference
The game birds do not agree with the smaller wild birds ; and indeed do not choose any English food. All the part- ridges, both English and Hungarian, have an overmastering preference for millet. Their special fondness for barley, on which all field observers, especially in Norfolk, insist, goes by the board when they can get millet. Is their choice dictated by the taste or the presence of some essential chemical ? A department of research that would have interested Charles Darwin concerns natural selection. By a succession of ingenious devices, which include valvular trap doors, the cock and hen partridges are enabled to show their preferences, and as soon as the selection is decided the pair conduct them- selves into a private enclosure. The hen decides the matter. She will reject a succession of crowing and displaying cocks and then definitely and decidedly choose one not noticeably different from the others. The experiment has abundantly proved two things ; first that the Hungarians mate success- fully with the English birds; secondly, that the birds will breed as readily in captivity as in the wild. Both these things have been from time to time denied, even by some persons of authority.
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