They tell me it is a poor year for pheasants
because of cold weather in the spring, but not being a shooting man I doubt if I would have noticed this for myself. There always seem to be pheasants about when I go across the fields and woods in this valley. They are designed by nature to be singularly conspicuous in an English setting, of course, and exceptionally audible, too.
As far as I am concerned, the sight and sound of pheasants are among the pleasures of the landscape. I like to hear eneir piercing, crowing calls echoing in the trees, and the sun glinting on their plumage is as pleasing as a rainbow in a wintry scene. This morning I came across a dozen or so strutting about a green field on an outlying farm. I know of no sight more classically typical of the traditional English rural landscape; which is, of course, a paradox, since the species is not only exotic but is also very obviously so. Through t'ne centuries which have passed since their introduction, pheasants have become inextricably tangled up with traditional English country life. So of course have the Normans, who have been in this island for roughly the same length of time; but the human intruders showed themselves rather better at merging with their new environment. Pheasants still look outlandish, different, flashily foreign; and yet they belong.
A lot of the pheasants which lord it over our fields are of course reared so as to provide targets for the guns, although there are some wild birds also. In any case the desire to encourage pheasants has had a large and altogether beneficial effect upon the look of the countryside, which still persists even in these days of greedy agriculture, when the pressure to crop every inch of ground is intense. I think perhaps my fondness for pheasants owes something to our shared ideas about what constitutes a desirable stretch of country. The ideal pheasant shoot is full of variety. It has large areas of covert, some arable land, some bog, some heath, and plenty of undulations and hedgerows and banks. That is what I like, too, and, thanks to the activities of no doubt unpardonably privileged landowners who have shot pheasants in this parish since the dim past, that is what we still have here, although trne hedges are getting fewer as they are almost everywhere else in England. I hate to think what would have happened to all the patches of copse and spinney if the game birds' needs had been disregarded.
Poaching, I am told, is not what it was. I suppose this goes with increasing affluence and decreasing intimacy with the wild life of the district. Some of the gypsies from our local encampment are universally believed to help themselves to pheasants from time to time, but theirs is small-scale raiding. There is nothing like the ancient tension between the haves and the havenots in this respect. I have heard some extraordinary stories of the old poachers' methods, perhaps the oddest of all being the practice of anaesthetising roosting pheasants by lighting sulphur candles beneath their perches on still nights. I cannot vouch for the truth of this tale, but it is said to have occurred. Certainly the use of nooses and snares and even fishhooks baited with fruit is well authenticated, and the catapult must have accounted for many an illicit bag. The great thing about all poachers' methods was that they were silent and so unlikely to alert the patrolling gamekeepers.
The keepers, also, linger on rather like isolated garrisons left behind by a great army. Once they were a powerful force in the community, both numerically and in terms of the authority they wielded. It was normal for an estate to employ, not one keeper, but a team of them, with the head man enjoying considerable prestige and position. The keeper of our local shoot is an unassuming man who keeps himself to himself, although he knows more about the country and its life than anyone else, I imagine. He was deeply apologetic one day last season whEn a shcwer of pellets rattled against my raincoat as I was going along a footpath while " the shooters " were at work nearby. His forebears, I fancy, would have adopted a far more cavalier attitude towards such trifles as public rights of way. But at least the pheasants are as arrogant as ever, as they show off their oriental plumage in the chilly sunlight.
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