Game birds don't mind the Mayo cold, it's the damp that gets them

COUNTRYFILE

TIGHT between two clumps of dead rushes and roofed with a tidy arc of winter grass we found a shallow depression, inside which the vegetation had been lightly trodden down to form a shallow bowl.

I knew immediately whose home this was, for a long time ago, while living amid English hill and moor, we found the nests of common pheasant year on year.

Sometimes we left them just as they were.

On other occasions we took half a dozen of the 10 to 12 olive-coloured eggs, to hatch them underneath a broody bantam.

The results were always the same.

The young pheasants, on emerging from the egg, were immediately wild.

The poor bantam into whose care they had been given would be all over the place and quite out of her mind, trying to gather them together and maintain some kind of social order.

We joked about foreign tongues. How could a pheasant ever learn chicken-speak?

Even though these young birds probably never met their real parents, they refused to obey their foster mother in the least thing, a failing which invariably led to their undoing.

When crows would arrive on the scene mum would rush about with her wings spread, urging her charges to find shelter and security in their shade.

The pheasants didn't get it at all, but stayed out in the open to be picked off one after another.

Very few reached adolescence and of those that did, I don't think many survived to adulthood.

We came to realise that if we wanted to see pheasants about the place then we should leave them to their own designs.

The same holds true for here, of course.

Pheasants are far less common in the west of Ireland than they are in the UK.

For one thing, the shooting and hunting industry is far more developed over there, where the weather is far better suited for the rearing of game birds.

Like lambs, they don't mind the cold. It's the damp that kills them off.

No matter what we personally think or feel about the practice of blasting helpless birds out of the air with salvos of lead shot, we have to acknowledge the contribution shooting has made to the rural economy in the United Kingdom.

Pheasant shooting is expensive over there, with single shooter charges as high as a thousand pounds for a single day or even more, depending on the number of birds shot.

Gamekeepers earn a decent wage, and through the short shooting season part-time work is available for many who are truly glad of it.

On the downside, the introduction of large numbers of pheasant and partridge into the environment has long-term consequences for the wildlife.

Gamekeepers will not tolerate foxes or any other kind of predator eating a way into their livelihood.

One estimate put the number of pheasants released into the British countryside at over 40 million, about one third of which were recorded as shot. So where did the rest go?

But we are here, not there, and the pheasants we see are probably wild bred, the way they should be.

I hear the cock pheasant occasionally, when I get up early enough.

There he is at first light, somewhere beyond the garden hedge, flapping his wings behind his back, throwing his head up and crowing loud and clear.

He has at least two wives, both of them brown and coy, and one of these has her nest ready for the inevitable.

I am tempted to go and look every day, just to see if the first eggs have arrived.

When they do I shall leave them where they are. She can rear them well, for our enjoyment, with the guns left at home.