A Gamekeeper's Note-book

A gamekeeper's notes are written for the most part on the tablets of his mind. He is a man of silence; yet he is ever ready to unlock the casket of his memories if old friends,...

Wood-pigeons are among the gamekeeper's perquisites. Apart from a very occasional request from "the house" for the wherewithal for pigeon-pie, the pigeons shot are for the benef...

Though kestrels, unhappily, are still brought to the gallows, with the barn-owl and other creatures innocent of injury to game, keepers grow more discriminating in the matter of...

There is a theory that the eyes of wild creatures magnify things seen, so that they appear many times larger than to human eyes. This has been held to explain why creatures smal...

"Catching up" is, in its way, a fine art. One secret is to place the cages, before use, in the principal feeding-places without setting them for action, for a few weeks. Cages o...

By the middle of April, the gamekeeper finds that a few of his pheasants are sitting. They are the older hens. Those that begin to lay early in April do not often lay more than...

Seventeen is the regulation number of pheasant eggs to be put beneath each hen, and seventeen chicks are put with each hen in the coops in the rearing-field. The most motherly h...

Rats seem to have a deep-rooted terror of anything that probes and prods. Perhaps some of them when their holes are disturbed associate the trouble with pitchforks. For hundreds...

If one thing annoys a keeper more than another, it is to have foxes turned down on his beat without warning. It is bad enough that foxes should be turned down at all--especially...

Yet it is hardly fair to compare pheasants to partridges. The difference in their habits of life makes it necessary that partridges should learn to use their wings more quickly...

The keeper finds his game-nests with his eyes, the fox with his nose. The keeper who must preserve game and preserves foxes takes steps to overcome the scent of his birds. He sp...

The self-binder has favoured the chance of escape for those rabbits that camp out in the corn. In these days of neatly tied sheaves the rabbit that makes a dash, with a little d...

To find out how the wild birds have fared is always difficult: one never sees them properly until the days of shooting are at hand--and not always then, when a sight of them rat...

A sporting old gentleman, who was very deaf, always took a small boy with him shooting, whose duty seemed to be to stand behind his master and do nothing. He never carried cartr...

In autumn, rabbits receive special attention from the long-net poachers. On a night not too dark or windy, yet windy and dark enough, the long-netters find all omens propitious....

The keeper welcomes a generous supply of acorns--provided that the trees which yield them grow in his woods, and not exclusively near the boundary of his beat. Wood-pigeons, as...

A good story in proof of a retriever's reasoning powers is told by an old-time sportsman. He was shooting beside a frozen stream, and winged a mallard, which fell in mid-stream....

Wet weather is often a benefit to the fox. Like all accomplished night thieves he is more venturesome in attacking hand-reared birds when the wind howls and rain beats heavily d...

A mild open autumn and a green winter also mean much to the farmers and to the gamekeepers; a blessing on many accounts, a curse on others. The farmer groans because his land is...

One time that often came to his mind was when Master Charles plagued the life out of him to be taken, at night, through a bedroom window, by way of a ladder, on a hunt for poach...