Part 8

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 of years rats have lived in corn-ricks, and at threshing time when the sheaves have been lifted by pitchforks have bolted furiously. The first thrust of the pitchfork into a protecting sheaf puts out the rats, though well aware of the presence of men and dogs. When the iron bar comes crashing into the burrow, perhaps the rats half expect the soil to be uplifted as if it were a sheaf of corn.

SUMMER

A Keeper Chorister

The gamekeeper has a way of putting things to surprising and ingenious uses. Usually he carries a dog-lead concealed somewhere about his person--a yard or two of string attached to a simple spring clip; and this lead serves a hundred purposes apart from restraining dogs. One case we remember well, where a dog-lead saved a situation. The vocal services of a keeper had been impressed for a festival of choirs; but when he arrived, just before the procession was timed to start, it was found that the one cassock which would encircle his figure was so long that he could walk in it only with danger of falling. Of course there was no string anywhere to be found, except in the shape of the dog-lead. The dog-lead saved the day, and the robed procession started off, lustily singing. It chanced that the keeper was one of the two leading choirmen, and when he noticed that his companion was rather headstrong in taking a corner, "Heel, will yer," he was heard to mutter, absent-mindedly, as he flicked his friend with the snap of his dog-lead from a besurpliced arm-hole; "heel, sir, heel."

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Velveteens

There was something pleasing about the old familiar name for the gamekeeper--"Velveteens": but it has been dropped almost completely, because no longer appropriate. In the old times all gamekeepers were clad in ample coats of velveteen. To-day, for one in velveteen you may see a hundred in tweeds. And it is only the Cockney who calls the keeper "Velveteens" to his face--thereby putting him on his dignity at the least, if not insulting him. The old-time coat was pleasant to the eye, so long as it was kept unspotted by rain. But its bloom departed after a few minutes' exposure to a generous shower, and no amount of drying or brushing would bring it back. Moreover, the shirt of the man beneath the coat would probably suffer also from the wetting. The best of velveteen was its thorn-resisting qualities. Tweeds resist rain besides the thorns--the thick, heavy, closely-woven tweeds of the neutral brown tint that are now the fashion for keepers' clothes. It is a long time before they can be thoroughly wetted--and the keeper's wife will tell you it is as long before they can be thoroughly dried. They have two drawbacks--if made to fit closely and well they are uncomfortable for shooting until almost worn out; and they are too hot and heavy for summer wear. Employers would be investing profitably if they allowed their keepers, instead of the one suit a year, a summer and a winter suit. Comfort in dress makes a wonderful difference in the keeper's work; hence the keeper's affection for his oldest things and his scorn of appearances. His old breeches and gaiters become part of himself. A keeper who always donned trousers on Sunday invariably wore the old gaiters beneath them so that his legs might feel properly encased.

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Owls and Hawks

Small birds, like men, misunderstand the owl--and it is always a curious sight to watch the mobbing of a night-bird by other smaller birds. Presumably the angered birds mistake the owl for a hawk. At any rate, they know him for a stranger, and no proven friend. When the swallows are alarmed by the appearance of an owl in day-time, they perform wonderful feats of flight, as they dart at the great bird from every angle, and swerve about him in every degree of curve. We have counted fourteen swallows' nests built in a shed against a pigeon loft wherein a pair of barn-owls were rearing their three young ones; we wondered how far the swallows were aware of the owls' presence, and what they thought about it. If they mobbed a parent owl by day there could be little real cause for their wrath--as little as when a missel-thrush or a jay joins in the outcry raised in the wood against the brown owl.

Enlightened keepers leave all hawks unmolested, except perhaps on the rare occasions when they catch one in the act of gamecide. Beyond question, hawks as a rule do far more good to game interests than harm; and the kestrel, if he ever does any harm, pays for it a hundred-fold by his tireless industry in keeping down mice and voles. Once we carefully watched for several weeks the nests of three pairs of sparrow-hawks; and among the remains of their feasts the legs of only one young pheasant were discovered.

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The Bold Sparrow-Hawk

It is time, and high time, that sparrow-hawks were placed under the protecting wing of the law. Generations of gamekeepers have persecuted them relentlessly: it says much for their courage, strength, and craftiness that any should remain to offer a target for the keeper's gun. But they grow scarce; they are seen far less commonly than kestrels, whose usefulness and innocence of gamecide is beginning to be a little understood. If sportsmen would consider the evidence for and against sparrow-hawks as despoilers of game--if they would rely no longer on prejudice and crass ignorance--we feel sure they would take steps to stay the wanton slaughter by their gamekeepers of these handsome, useful birds. Keepers ought to be forbidden to destroy any sparrow-hawks, except those which clearly prove themselves guilty of killing game as a habit. How thoughtless, ruthless, and mistaken is the keeper's zeal in killing them, we could show by a hundred instances. To take one: It chanced that part of a patch of buckwheat had been left unharvested, so that the pheasants might help themselves to the grain. Thousands of small birds flocked to feed on the choice feast. A gamekeeper noticed that sparrow-hawks found this patch of buckwheat a fine hunting-ground, and would perch in a clump of tall trees near by. He therefore hid himself in the trees, with a gun, and bagged four hen sparrow-hawks, which had been well employed in thinning the ranks of the small birds.

Countrymen will speak of the cock sparrow-hawk as the little blue hawk, as though it were a separate variety: not knowing that the cock bird is about half the size of his mate. Blue hawks, pigeon hawks, and five-barred hawks are among the sparrow-hawk's local names, arising from the blue-grey colour of the upper parts of their plumage, from their occasional habit of attacking wood-pigeons, and from the five striking bars of brownish black on their tails. Less common than kestrels, sparrow-hawks are far less conspicuous: while the kestrel hovers high in the air on the look-out for prey (whether a mouse or a grasshopper), the sparrow-hawk's way is to glide low over the fields and along the hedges, swooping suddenly through gaps to pounce on unsuspecting small birds. The size and shape of the wings, and therefore the flights of the two birds, are very different. The sparrow-hawk's wings are inclined to be rounded and short; the kestrel's are long and pointed. While the young of the two birds have a great deal in common, the fledged young may be distinguished readily by the white spot on the lower part of the back of the sparrow-hawk's head. Each bird has a fatal way of coming to investigate the sound of a gunshot. If a shot is fired in the direction of a hawk flying far out of range, say a hundred yards distant, it will instantly dart down and towards the gunner, nearly always within easy range. We have seen this happen many times.

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Nest and Young

Like the kestrel, the sparrow-hawk is content with a slovenly nest, which it builds of dead twigs on the ruins of other nests--usually those of magpies, crows, or pigeons. Or it uses a squirrel's drey as a foundation, or comes year after year to its own old home. Usually the chosen site is not very high in a tree--larches and oaks are favourites--and the nest will be found near the trunk: in short oaks it may be in the cup formed where several branches spread away. We have found a nest within ten feet of the ground. The nest, when you climb to it, is much larger than it appears from below, and only a man with long arms could encircle it. There may be five eggs, pale white, blotched with dark chestnut-brown, the markings of eggs in one clutch sometimes showing a beautiful variation, while the markings of the clutches of different birds differ considerably. The shells, like those of the kestrel's eggs, are very thick--even the hawk's sharp claws would hardly puncture them without intentional effort.

Should you hear a soft whistling in a wood--not unlike the whistling of the farmer's wife when she calls her chickens to meals, but much subdued--you may know there is a sparrow-hawk's nest not far away. A glimpse of the whistler gives rise to a general alarm-cry among blackbirds. If the whistling leads to the discovery of young hawks, on your approach they will assume attitudes suggestive of disgust and resentment. In their poses and markings there is something owl-like about young hawks: and, as with young owls, there is a good deal of difference in the size of the fledglings, and in the state of their feathering. The strongest young one has the pick of the food, and quickly outgrows his brothers and sisters. Should the mother bird be killed, the cock will rear the family unaided on the small birds on which they thrive. The preservation of woods has meant a steady increase in the hosts of small birds, and hawks in consequence are under no necessity to prey on game-birds. Some sparrow-hawks will acquire the game-feeding habit: others will pounce by chance on a small game-bird; but sparrow-hawks are in no way dependent on game, living for the most part on finches and the like, thereby helping to preserve the balance of scales of which the gamekeeper and his master take little heed.

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The Keeper Outwitted

One evening we were passing through a large, old-fashioned wood, when we came upon a keeper feeding his pheasants--many hundreds of them: and the talk went round to the question of sparrow-hawks and game. We suggested that it was a wise keeper who spared the sparrow-hawk--that this hawk did not kill game for a tithe of its food--and that the time only came to kill it after it had been proved to attack game as a habit. But the keeper would not hear of this; and he thanked his stars, he said, that not a sparrow-hawk remained alive in his woods. Just as he said these words we chanced to see before us on the ride, in the middle of the long rank of pheasant coops, a dead blackbird. The feathers lay scattered about the bird in a circle; there was every sign of a sparrow-hawk's work. We called the keeper's attention to that blackbird's body. He agreed that a hawk had killed it, and then we drew from him the confession that he had not lost a single pheasant from a sparrow- or any other hawk. The keeper told us a story of how a brood of sparrow-hawks had been reared in a tree at the back of the very hut in which the pheasants' food was mixed. Though the hut was also a sort of watch-tower, yet the man who spent his days thereabouts had failed to notice the hawks until the young birds left the nest. This is not to say that the powerful old hen sparrow-hawk did not raid the pheasants; but it is certain that she outwitted the under-keeper who worked daily at the hut, and it proves that an under-keeper may not know all that is to be known about sparrow-hawks and their ways.

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A Jackdaw Nursery

Among the birds not loved by keepers are jackdaws. One old keeper friend of ours has brought hundreds of jackdaws to a bad end. One evening, years ago, when walking through a park, his keen eyes noticed a hole high up in the stem of an ash-tree; and as he looked, out flew a jackdaw--never to return. Passing that way again, another jackdaw flew out, and paid the penalty of living in that keeper's preserves. He found the hole to be a favourite place for these birds, for it made an excellent nursery for the young. Season after season, the keeper kept his eye on the hole. As he went by, he would make a peculiar squeaking noise, which would call out any birds that might be at home. The stem of the tree about the hole became riddled with shot with such curious effect that when the tree fell the keeper cut out the section containing the hole; and it may be seen in his parlour, among other treasures, to this day.

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Detective Work

The gamekeeper is a trained detective. He is for ever setting a trap to catch a poacher. Across a ride where poachers may come at night, he will stretch a piece of invisible twine or wire, and he is at pains to place it just so far from a sharp stump that any one tripping will probably break a nose. Anxious for a good night's rest, he keeps a light burning in one of his cottage windows, so that the poachers may think he is out and about; or when he goes out he pulls down a blind in his bedroom, as if he were sleeping within. Meeting workmen in the lanes near his preserves, he sends his dog for a sniff at their dinner-baskets--the dog soon tells him if there is game inside where should be bread and cheese.

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Cattle in the Woods

A dreadful idea to the keeper is the thought of cattle in his coverts. The worst that a mad bull could do in a china shop would make a faint picture of destruction beside the havoc wrought by cattle in well-stocked preserves. Happy the keeper whose coverts are guarded by good fences in the days when flies torture cattle, and colts are most mischievous. If in hot weather a breach has once been made in a fence by cattle or horses, they will persist in trying to find their way into the woods. One can only pity the pheasant who sits on her eggs, on some sunny bank of a covert fence, while a herd of unbroken cart-colts go lumbering round the field, each shouldering each in an ill-judged swerve from the fence. Even in their calm moments colts are inquisitive, and leave nothing alone that is living and within their reach. We remember a case where a pheasant nested on the outside bank of a wood, and the colts in the field, pushing into the living fence, actually nosed her from her nest, and there was good evidence that they then chawed every one of her eggs. Most difficult of all creatures to keep out of woods are roaming swine. The strongest of live fences offers only a temporary check to their boring ability. And pigs have good noses, and few rabbit-stops and nests of eggs on the ground escape them. If a keeper's woods are infested by pigs he can scarcely be blamed for shooting his own bacon.

The keeper has an eye for the trim and pleasing appearance of his woods. He takes a genuine pleasure in their beauty. Jealous of the untrodden appearance of his secret paths, his annoyance is ill-concealed when the hunt cuts up his green rides. He would cheerfully forego the reward for the finding of a fox if he could preserve his rabbit-shorn sward--green and as smooth as velvet. And in his soul is a secret hatred of the traffic of the woodmen's waggons. Their great wheels crush and destroy the promising young underwood; woodmen, removing tree-trunks, ruthlessly plough up lawn-like turf; they have no care and no eye for the young growths of hazel, ash, maple, thorn or brier, to say nothing of bramble and bracken; and their waggons, carts and horses' hoofs spread a desolation which brings curses to the keeper's lips.

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A Tragedy of the Woodlands

We know a wood near the Hampshire Highlands that was once famous for its ash, and would be as famous now if the wood's owner had his keeper's fine feeling. The keeper's heart was cut if frost blackened the leaves; this was a grim tragedy. And there were larches of gun-barrel straightness. An order was given that the wood should be laid low. The woodmen came with saw and axe, beetle and wedges, they cut all the trees, and sent them to the guillotine of the travelling steam-saw, which spoiled as fair a meadow as any in Hampshire. Next the woodland was thrown open to cattle, horses, and sheep. Then the keeper was dismissed: and glad he was to go.

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Fox and Partridge

When shooting parties begin again strange stories are repeated about pheasants and partridges. We remember hearing a learned disquisition on the subject of the fox and the hen partridge; the argument was that the fox is only occasionally successful when he makes a grab at a hen partridge sitting on her eggs, and that the hen, after fluttering from the jaws of death, will return unconcernedly to her duties. Further, even if the fox were so lucky as to capture the hen, the cock partridge would most obligingly take up the sitting and hatch the eggs. But no case was cited where a fox had been known to attempt to catch a sitting cock partridge--from which the inference might be drawn that the fox has a special aversion to the sitting cock.

Much nonsense of this sort is swallowed with good faith by those not closely in touch with foxes and game. We have an old book called "The Life of a Fox: Written by Himself." In this we read that a sitting bird acquires a thinness and flavour which are abhorrent to the taste of a fox; nonsense guised as sense could hardly go further. It would be grossly disparaging to the fox's skill to say that he fails once in a hundred times when making a grab at a sitting bird; and we are sure that a cock partridge does not take up the duties of his wife as often even as a fox fails to bring off a catch. We have never known a cock partridge to take the place of his murdered mate on the nest, but every gamekeeper knows he will rear the brood when the hen is killed after hatching.

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A Study in Perseverance

We have a pretty story to tell ourselves about the perseverance of partridges. In a district where few were found, a pair had left the fields and nested within a stone's-throw of the keeper's cottage. It stood in a green glade, sheltered on all sides by rambling old woods. For four successive seasons this partridge pair nested within a few yards of the same spot: and year after year something upset their plans, and spoiled all prospects of their hope of a covey--a hedgehog, rooks, inquisitive children, but, luckily, not a fox. The fifth season found the persevering birds trying again; their nest contained seventeen eggs. The site was an obvious one, but now the birds' luck turned. Just when it seemed that nothing could keep the nest from the eyes of any curious passers-by, a fine plant of hemlock sprang up to provide a screen and shelter. Every egg was then hatched, and every chick was reared to the flying stage. True, by September the young birds had been reduced until only nine were left. But as the keeper said, that was better than that a fox should have killed the old hen on her nest; and a family of nine was very creditable to a pair of five-year-old birds.

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The Hut in the Woods

Your gamekeeper is a skilled cook, and his open-air kitchen is a place of curious interest. For the first five or six weeks of their lives young pheasants are regaled several times daily with meals of hard-boiled eggs, custard, biscuit-meal, oatmeal, canary-seed, greaves and rice--seasoned with spices. Look into the keeper's hut in the woods, and you will see quite a collection of sacks filled with choice foods--cracked maize, dari-seed, groats, rice, preparations of dried meat, and finely dressed meals of wheat and barley. When the birds have learned to go to roost only one meal a day is provided. In his kitchen the keeper prepares a thin meat soup, sometimes of sheeps' heads; this is boiled, then cooled, chopped lettuce and onion, and barley and other meals are added, and then the rations of the pudding-like mass are rolled into small pellets. Over the keeper's kitchen the keeper's wife has no jurisdiction. In some sheltered corner from which he can keep an eye on his birds he builds himself a fireplace of two parallel rows of bricks open at each end, so that he may burn long sticks and save himself the labour of chopping wood if pressed for time. Sometimes he will get the village blacksmith to fashion a sort of iron gallows from which to hang his great cooking-pots, each containing eight or nine gallons, and of no small weight. By November many keepers have cooked the last meal for their pheasants--others may be preparing a final supper, whistling till their jaws ache to call the birds to the meal--on the morrow to do their utmost to send the long-tails to destruction.

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Pheasant Chicks

"Mothering" is the factor which makes all the difference between a moderately good and a very good season for young pheasants. A hen pheasant, when her chicks are quite small, can easily give warmth and shelter to a dozen or more; after the first week or so some have to go without, and unless the weather is fine and warm, they perish before they are covered by body feathers. Weather conditions that have had a bad effect on partridges may have little effect on pheasants. Many suppose that if partridges have suffered from drought, pheasants, especially wild ones, must have suffered also. But wild pheasants have an advantage in several ways. The period during which they lay and hatch their eggs and rear their young is much longer than with partridges. If the last ten days of June be days of cold, heavy, ceaseless rain, they may practically annihilate the partridge chicks. But at that time a great number of young pheasants are old enough to withstand a considerable rainfall. Nor are the pheasants of tender age--only a section of the pheasant crop--so much at the mercy of bad weather as are tender partridges, for their haunts are chiefly in and about the woods and hedgerows, which afford shelter from cold and wet. In times of drought, the pheasants have the best chance of finding, among the shaded herbage, and beneath the masses of decaying leaves, enough moist insect food to carry them over to better days. It is on account of the better insect-supply in moist places that in very thin partridge seasons, where birds have suffered heavily from drought in open places, a few fine coveys may often be found on the fringes of woods. And in very wet seasons, the shelter and warmth of underwood also explain the survival of strong coveys. The end of September marks the time of the breaking-up of the pheasant broods. The young birds no longer remain with their mothers; the young cocks begin to feel self-conscious and gallant in their fine feathers, growing richer daily, and duels are fought as by way of practice for the fierce struggles of their first spring. You may hear at the roosting-time of the birds the crude efforts of the young cocks to say "cock-up" instead of "peep-peep." Their utterances are an inharmonious blending of treble and bass; indeed old pheasant cocks and the birds of the year are as different in voice as grown men and choir-boys, old rooks and young.

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The Roosting Habit