Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 57, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 March 1911 — HEN HAS HARD TASK [ARTICLE]

HEN HAS HARD TASK

Experiment With Pheasant’s Eggs Quite Expensive. i - r Domestic Fowl Compelled to Sacrifice Its Own Progeny in Hatching— Law Will Protect English ’ Bird for Years. Jefferson City, Mo. —More work for the patient Missouri hen! " In addition to her other duties, she is now expected to hatch out pheasants. The pheaasnt is a sort of everybody-works-But-mother bird, which will not sit—or is it set?—on its own eggs—while in captivity. It being manifest that George can’t do it, there is no way out of it except to shove the unwelcome task onto the hens. That is vahat State Game Commissioner Tolerton is doing in his effort to introduce the English pheasant in Missouri. It will be a thankless task, too, for. as soon as a pheasant is large enough to get about, the first thing he does is to go out foraging for chicken feed. He will even steal from his own foster mother. In his efforts to accustom pheasants to the Missouri climate Tolerton is sending pheasants free to all farmers and poultry raisers who ask for them. The result Is that colonies of the gaudy birds are now to be found in inany parts of the state. Farmers already are loudly complaining that the pheasants ''are robbing their chickens of feed. For this there is no remedy, as it is unlawful to kill a pheasant in Missouri. Almost any one who asks for pheasants can get them from Tolerton. There are only a few simple conditions. First of these Is that, no matter how' many pheasants you raise, you will not be permitted to kill one, even for your own table. You must keep an exact account of the eggs laid and you must either send these eggs to the state poultry farm at Jefferson City or set them under your hens and send the young birds to the game commissioner for distribution in the state. Here is where the hen gets the worst of it. After she has taken all the trouble to hatch out the pheasants they are taken away from her. Worse than that, she might seek consolation in hatching out a few children of her own, but even this pleasure is denied her. For, until the young pheasants are two months old, the only food on which they ,will thrive is fresh hen’s eggs. Biddy’s nest is robbed to feed them and she must bear the double Injustice to bringing Into the world creatures for which she has no natural affection and of seeing them thrive on the ruins of her fondest hopes for a posterity which' would do credit to the great Missouri hen family. At the experimental farm near Jefferson City 450 hens are working over-

time laying eggs for young pheasants to eat. The pheasant In its present stage of Americanization is not a revenue maker for anybody. The law forbids it from being used as food and the regulations surrounding the distribution of the birds prevent even the most opulent from breakfasting on bacon and pheasant eggs. The hen, on the other hand, is the state’s greatest wealth producer and her friends can’t see why she should be shoved into the background by an imported fowl whose beauty is of about as much practical value as is that of the aurora borealis. Commissioner Tolerton says that the pheasant is one of the greatest of game birds and that in time the spe-

cies will be so plentiful in Missouri that pheasant hunting will he permitted.