Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PHEASANTS ROOSTING 7 weather, but I believe that any one who set himself seriously to test this theory would soon feel like substituting " nothing " for " something " in the statement of the proposition. It is much as with Sir Robert Redgauntlet'sjackanape, I suspect—" ran about the haill castle chattering, and yowling, and pinching, and biting folk, specially before ill weather or disturbances in the state." Every one knows the loud trumpety note, as I call it, with which a pheasant flies up on to its perch, for the night. It is a tremendous clamour, and continues, sometimes, for a long time after the bird is settled. But sometimes, after each loud flourish, there comes an answer from another bird, which is quite in an undertone ; in fact a different class of sound altogether, brief, and without the harsh resonance of the other, so that you would not take it to be the cry of a pheasant at all were it not always in immediate response to the loud one. It proceeds, too, from the same spot or thereabouts. What, precisely, is the meaning of this soft answering note ? What is the state of mind of the bird uttering it, and by which of the sexes is it uttered ? It is the cock that makes the loud trumpeting, and were another cock to answer this, one would expect him to do so in a similar manner. It is in April that my attention has been more particularly drawn to this after-sound, so that, though early in the month, one may suppose the male pheasant to have mated with at least a part of his harem. One would hardly expect, however, to find a polygamous bird on terms of affectionate connubiality with one or other of his wives, and yet this little duet reminds me, strongly, of what onemay often hear, sitting in the woods, when wood- pigeons are cooing in the spring. Almost always they are...