Part 4

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 smaller and weaker than man, like hares and rabbits, flee desperately at his approach--a reasonable habit if all men to them are as giants. One's sympathies would go out to the rabbit if he sees foxes as horses, and weasels as foxes. If birds' eyes have magnifying power, many miracles of flight and of feeding would seem natural. The swift passage of birds through obstacles that appear to our eyes to be almost impenetrable is something of a miraculous nature. Without a moment's survey of difficulties or direction, a bird flashes through a jungle where there is no possible way for it to be found by human eyes. The blackbird flies shrieking in and out of a dense hedge of thorns; but not a feather is ruffled in the course of his intricate flight. Or watch the jay or the sparrow-hawk passing at speed through an almost solid network of twigs and stems. The human eye cannot properly follow this performance by the sparrow-hawk; a swish and a streak of bluish grey, and it is gone. Many a bold jay, finding itself caught between beaters and guns, has saved its life by this wonderful power of flight at speed, going away without giving the slightest chance for a shot; it will dash out of a wall of undergrowth on one side of a ride sheer into another wall. No doubt the jay knows to an inch which is the shortest cut out of man's sight. Hardly less wonderful than birds' flight through crowded obstacles is the way in which rabbits scurry and twist through masses of fern and brambles. But where the theory of eye magnification would seem most probably true is where tits and goldcrests are searching for food on the underside of fir boughs, and finding food which no man's eye could see unaided.

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The Season's End

While February 1 brings security to pheasants and partridges, hares--where any survive in spite of the Ground Game Act--are now also nearly safe from persecution, thanks, however, to the courtesy of sportsmen, and not to the law. Like rabbits, hares may be killed all the year round, but, unlike rabbits, they may not be sold or exposed for sale between the first day of March and the last day of July.

The end of the season has a strong effect on the gamekeeper. February 2 marks his annual truce with his birds, save woodcock, snipe and wild-fowl. Thereafter he loses the vindictive look of the shooting season--he becomes a man of peace. For long months he has been scheming death and destruction--he has devoted himself wholly to the science of killing game. Happy, if anxious, his face has been as he has bustled his birds to guns belching forth some three hundred pellets of lead at each discharge. At the end of the day he has rejoiced over the long rows of the dead, in feather and fur, while his hand jingles gold and silver--his reward for success in the contest of wit and reason against cunning and instinct. The second day of February comes--and his whole nature seems to undergo a change. No longer he boasts to his rival neighbour how a week ago come to-morrow the bag was so many hundred pheasants, and would have been doubled if the guns had shot "anyhow at all." But he will make a boast of the numbers of his hen pheasants. The sight of hen pheasants is the greatest joy of his days--over his hens he watches with maternal love. "And how many hens was there?"--this is the answer he will return should you mention casually that you had seen pheasants feeding in a field.

As to cock pheasants, his sensations are different. The sight of a cock pheasant is a taunt. The veteran cocks that have passed unscathed through the shooting season now grow proud in bearing, and the keeper thinks they seem to eye him with scornful looks. They are approaching the reward of their cunning, of their keen eyes, their sharp ears, their speedy legs--the possibility of several wives is before them. No matter where the keeper goes now, he is taunted by the sight and sound of these victorious veterans that have eluded all his efforts to bring them low. In summer it is the lament of the twenty thousand gamekeepers in this country that there are "too many cocks by half."

An idea is widespread among keepers, if not among employers, that they are privileged, by virtue of their office, to kill off superfluous cock pheasants for ten days after the end of the season. The mistake may have arisen from the fact that licensed dealers in game may expose game for sale for ten days after the end of the shooting season. We knew an old keeper whose antipathy to superfluous cocks was deeply rooted: the sight of too many cocks maddened him. By an ingenious argument he was able to overcome his legal and conscientious scruples as to disposing of the unnecessary game. The legal scruples troubled him more than those of conscience; but this argument always prevailed: "It is not lawful to take cocks killed out of season to my master's larder. But if I should happen to have any dead ones to dispose of it would be a sinful waste to throw them away. Therefore, it will be best if I eat them myself."

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Beaters' Sport

Among others whose days of sport end with the season are those little considered sportsmen, the beaters. While making sport for others, they find opportunities for themselves, and it would be a churlish host or keeper who grudged the poor beaters the rabbits which occasionally they knock over with their sticks. But their love of sport becomes too marked when, in a gang, they creep along stealthily on the look-out for crouching rabbits for their own bagging, instead of plying their sticks with a will on the cover to drive forward game. They show some skill of a rough sort, and considerable woodcraft. A man gives no sign that he has seen a rabbit, his stride is unhalting as he comes up, and it is without any flourish that suddenly a swift, deft blow of the stick is delivered, aimed a little forward of the head. Too late, the rabbit knows its fatal mistake in thinking that the slow eyes of man had passed it over, as it crouched in its seat.

The law forbids any man to shoot either partridge or pheasant when the last second has passed away of the last minute of the first hour after sunset on the first day of February. No doubt the law-makers were mindful that the light one hour after sunset at the beginning of February would make it extremely difficult for a sportsman to hit a flying pheasant or partridge. The law-makers wisely drew no distinction between misses and hits--pheasant-shooting means, they held, shooting at a pheasant with evident intent to kill. What is hard to understand about the law is why the season does not end with the last day of January. Remembering that February 1 is often the day when the keeper goes from the old shoot to the new, we think it would be decidedly better for game that the day should be put out of season. It would be the worse for the poacher. As things are, February 1 is often a day of anarchy. And it would be a good plan if dog licences and the game season were made to end on the same day--the one expiration would serve as a reminder of the other.

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Tailless Cocks

If a pheasant is seen without a tail in the early part of the shooting season the cause may be put down as fox. Probably the tail has been lost through an ill-judged effort to capture the pheasant made by some inexperienced cub--the old fox well knows how important it is to grip the body of a bird, not merely feathers. But the end of the season also is a likely time for seeing birds, especially cocks, without tails. The cause then is not foxes' failures. Long before Christmas, even the foxes of the year are old in cunning, while the birds whom they robbed of tails in the days of their callow cubhood will have grown fresh feathers long since. The cock pheasant who must face courting days without a tail probably owes his loss of tail and dignity to a gunner who aimed too far behind, firing at close quarters.

But if you should see several cocks without tails at the end of the season the fewer questions you ask the keeper in public the better: the birds are the superfluous ones of those captured for the laying pens, and have been for a time imprisoned to provide a spirited ending to the last days of shooting. The keeper is not proud of them, and no doubt they are sorry for themselves.

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Preparations

From the young days of the year, when his hens began to lay once more, the keeper adds eggs to his store for the sake of the birds of May. His cares and worries, his long hours and weary trudgings, and the chances and changes of the weather make the keeper grumble more and more with the years; but he is always a devoted slave to sport, and takes pleasure in each act of preparation for a new season. Every time he adds to the store of feeding eggs he is thinking of the prospects of his pheasants. He sees chicks turning to awkward poults, and poults turning to full-feathered birds, topping the lofty trees or sailing high over the valley, while the guns are coughing below. Over his store of eggs for feeding he gloats like a miser over gold. Stowed away in a cool place these eggs--after each one has been dipped for about thirty seconds in boiling water--will keep their good feeding qualities for months.

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Hungry Rabbits

From the New Year until well on in March rabbits are hard pressed to find food--not necessarily because the weather may be bad, but because so many fields present a surface of bare earth, where hitherto rabbits have been able to find ungrudged pickings. When barred from other food, they will be driven to bark underwood, and so cause a price to be set on their heads; and cause people to think and say that a couple of rabbits are at least a score. When they are shut in a wood by wire netting, they will be almost certain to attack the undergrowth, whereas if free to come and go they would have done no damage to speak about, outside or in.

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To Save Underwood

The secret at once of preserving a few rabbits and saving the underwood from their attacks is judicious feeding. Swedes or mangels, and some tightly tied bundles of clover-hay, if thrown down in the rabbits' resorts will prevent much damage, and prove indirectly an excellent investment. The food will go far towards allowing foxes, shooting tenants, farmers, landlords, and the rabbits to dwell together without extraordinary annoyance to each other. Rabbits always have to bear the brunt of much more blame than they deserve, and are continuously persecuted from one year's end to another. Yet they are essential to the well-being alike of foxes and game, and ought to be better respected--especially when foxes and game in combination are considered desirable. The man so anxious to preserve foxes for hounds that he would not object if the foxes ate his last pheasants acts foolishly if he refuses to keep a few rabbits. The foxes will turn more than their usual attention to the pheasants, or they will shift their quarters to where rabbits are to be found, and a living is to be made with the least exertion.

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Studies in Fear

How far animals are conscious of fear, and where the instinct of self-preservation merges into fear, are questions not easily to be solved. A hare appears to be among the most timid of creatures, making off with speed at the slightest alarm--yet confidence in her own power to escape danger may drive all real fear from her heart. Instincts of fury, bravery and fear are nearly related.

There is a common idea that wild animals have an inborn fear of man. But it seems probable that where fear of man is marked it has been impressed upon the animals by example of parents, or experience. Fear, or at least a strong suspicion of what is unknown and strange, is evident among creatures of uninhabited places, though wild-fowl on waters visited by man for the first time may take no notice of a boat that sails through their flocks.

Flight is usually the first instinct of self-preservation. The zigzag start of a flight is cultivated by many besides snipe and woodcock--by hares, which bound from side to side of their line, and double back with a wonderful turn, when hard pressed; by deer pursued by wolves; by stoats when danger threatens; or by the rabbit nearly taken unawares by the spring of a cat or dog. But often a wild animal, surprised, will pause for a moment to snort or grunt, and strike the ground angrily with a fore-foot before making off--a stag for example. A stamp is a common signal or sign of annoyance, curiosity or danger. Both the weasel and the squirrel stamp impatiently with their front feet on occasions--as when they seem divided between curiosity and alarm at the presence of a motionless man. The stamp suggests an attempt to discover whether the man is friendly or hostile, alive and capable of action, or paralysed. The alarm signal given by rabbits, by striking the ground with their hind feet, produces a thumping noise, no doubt to be heard for a great distance underground. So far as danger from man goes, it is usually anticipated before it becomes pressing. Walk along a hedge within a yard of a partridge on her nest, or a leveret in its form, and no notice may be taken so long as you keep on walking. But stop, or even hesitate in your stride--the partridge or the leveret goes on the instant. Wary rooks will feed within a few yards of a man hoeing in a field--but let him stop his work, and take a look at them, and they wait for no stronger hint of danger.

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The Rookery

Rooks are the most conservative birds, and sometimes nothing will induce them to form a colony where their presence and their cawing would be the perfecting touches to the trees of some ancestral park. The most hopeful plan to tempt them is to put up old empty nests or brooms, or to put rooks' eggs into a nest that happens to be the desired place for the colony. Their strong preference for certain sites is curious; they will crowd nest-trees on one side of a road, and yet pay no attention to other trees of the same sort, seemingly more perfect for their needs, and only a few yards distant. We have watched a case where for twenty years the rooks remained faithful to the original nest-trees of the colony. About ten years ago half these trees were cut down, and even then the evicted rooks would not build in trees across the road, though their tops touched the tops of the favoured trees, which became more crowded with nests than ever. But two or three seasons ago their favourite nesting-tree, a beech with far-spread top, began to show signs of disease; and then, after a deal of wrangling, two or three pairs were permitted to nest in the trees near by, hitherto despised. In the next season there were nineteen nests in these trees, and in the next twenty-six. The old beech meantime grew more and more feeble, as the rooks perhaps discovered by some brittleness in the twigs at the top; and after one more year, though it bore foliage, but not so luxuriantly as usual, the tree gave shelter to only two nests. And now the long-despised trees are the home of almost the entire colony.

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When Rooks Build

In February, the rooks pay visits to their home-trees, wheeling and squawking round about, and demolishing old nests. On fine February evenings they linger after sunset before setting off to their winter roosting-place. A few, who have begun work on new nests, turn back to the trees undecided, then turn again after their companions. Not until the beginning of March do the rooks seriously set about their building, in mid-March deserting the great roosting-places of winter and mounting guard over their rough nests of sticks.

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Ways of the Crows

Rooks would seem to believe that while there is life there is hope. A dead rook displayed before other rooks for the first time attracts no particular attention beyond a casual inspection. But if a rook is wounded, and especially if it hops about with a broken wing, other rooks will swoop about it, and hover above with wonderful perseverance, squawking all the time excitedly, even in spite of a man with a gun. We have seen a hundred rooks perch on a fence to take stock of a relative caught in a trap set to pheasant eggs.

The cunning of rooks, crows, and magpies is very marked at nesting-time; and the keeper who would shoot them by hiding and waiting within shot of their nests may wait for hours in vain if the birds have seen him approach--as they seldom fail to do. The birds are cunning enough to watch from the top of a tall, distant tree, until they see the enemy go away, when they will return at once to the nest in full confidence. But they may be tricked quite easily. Let two men with a gun go together to stand below a rook's nest. Away go the nesting birds. Then let one of the men take his departure, with or without the gun, while the other waits. The birds will return promptly, as though they imagined both men had gone.

The keeper has small sympathy with the crow tribe, and takes every opportunity to reduce their numbers. Sometimes he will carry a ferret to an open spot, over which crows or others are likely to fly, peg the ferret down, and himself lie in wait with a gun. No rook, crow, magpie or jay can resist the temptation to mob the ferret. So the keeper takes advantage of the widespread bird-hatred of the weasel tribe. He traces a lost and wandering ferret by the wild clamouring of the jays that have caught sight of the bloodthirsty creature, or by hints from other birds, great and small.

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The Crow as Terrorist

Carrion crows hold mysterious sway over rooks; a single pair of crows will drive a great crowd of rooks from a rookery. Yet a crow, when compared to a rook, does not seem to be much more powerful or armed with a much more formidable beak. A casual observer would find little difference between a rook and a crow in the hand. If a pair of crows were pitted in a duel against a pair of rooks, the balance of power would make the odds slightly in the crows' favour no doubt. But one imagines the rooks would still have a sporting chance. Probably crows have a black enough reputation among other birds to inspire a general fear. And rooks are cowards. It is a common sight to see them put to shameful flight by peewits or missel-thrushes when they have ventured near the others' nesting-places. Yet a rook could kill a missel-thrush or peewit if it had the pluck to fight. The gamekeeper knows that the hissing and spitting of a sitting partridge will cause a rook to approach her very cautiously. A jackdaw, one would say, has ten times the spirit of a rook.

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Imperial Rooks

We have a little story of how some rooks paid a pretty compliment to an Empress. The preceding tenant of the Empress Eugénie's place at Farnborough is said to have spent hundreds of pounds in a vain attempt to induce rooks to build in the trees. Old brooms were hoisted--real rooks' nests, with and without eggs, were fixed in the most tempting sites among the tree-tops--young rooks were procured and given every attention--and some were even hatched and reared artificially. But the rooks refused to colonise. Then came the Empress; and promptly the rooks came also. Soon a flourishing rookery was established. Perhaps the new-comers, too, were exiles.

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Rook-Pie

Though May is still the month of rook-shooting, this sport has passed out of fashion, and rook-pie is no longer an honourable dish--it has sunk, indeed, into a place of disrepute from which no amount of steak, seasoning, and hard-boiled eggs can rescue it. In old times a dozen rooks would be sent and received with compliments, like a brace of pheasants; and labourers prized a few rooks as much as the charity beef at Christmas. But now one might search far before finding a cottager who would deign to eat rook-pie. The rooks are shot and buried, or are left where they fall beneath the rookery trees, for foxes to find and carry to their cubs.

The farmer and the gamekeeper have a common cause against the rooks, which, when they are not attacking the interests of the one are pilfering the produce of the other. An April blizzard consoles the keeper for the pheasants' eggs it ruins by blotting out a generation of rooks. For when such a disaster overtakes a rookery late in April, as young birds are nearly ready to leave the nests, the parent birds are hardly likely to make another attempt to rear a brood. But when rooks' eggs are frosted before or during hatching there will be late broods, not hatched until the trees are in full leaf. Then the young rooks might escape the watchful eye of the keeper were it not for the habit of squawking for food, and for the garrulous chuckling of the parent birds when feeding the hungry mouths. These late broods increase the toll of the eggs and young game birds, parent rooks taking five times as much food as the others.

Old rooks are very cunning in search of prey. On one excellent partridge-shoot there is a hedge bordered by telegraph poles. It is the only hedge on the place, and in seasons when grass and corn are backward it is packed with partridge nests. The rooks of the neighbourhood have learnt the trick of sitting on the telegraph wires, the better to find the way to the nests, as revealed by the movements of the nesting birds. Thus, waiting and watching in patience, in time they find out every nest in the hedge.

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Birds for Stock

In February the work begins of catching up pheasants for stocking aviaries, to supply the coming season's eggs. In mild Februaries, keeper after keeper tells the same sad story--he "can't catch no hens." Many of those caught in food-baited traps in mild weather are weak and unsound, and some are injured by shot, and so are not desirable for stock. The birds most capable of producing plenty of fertile eggs and strong chicks are those that scorn to enter a cage, except during hard or snowy weather. Some keepers make a practice of catching up the desired number of stock-birds before covert shooting begins. Otherwise they are caught up early in February--so that they may settle down to the new way of life before the laying season is upon them.