COUNTRY LIFE
Too Popular Pheasants I cannot but think that the pheasant, which may be legally killed this week, is attaining a popularity that does some harm to British sport. It is now preserved in all sorts of places where once it was unknown, places as unlike one another as the Lincolnshire marshes and the moors of Galloway. It is not a bird that agrees well with other birds ; and a pack of tame birds on the edge of a grouse moor is rather an alien spectacle, though a few wild pheasants in the hills are welcome enough. The bird is the favourite of the shooting syndicate ; and some members of these syndicates are seriously grieved if the bag for the season is not somewhere near to the number of pheasants " laid down." All this is apt to make shooting a much less friendly, a much more greedy sport than it once was, though the occasionally immense battue, as it was called, belongs to an earlier age. Another result in some districts has been the ruthless shooting of foxes ; and by consequence the multiplication of imported foxes.
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