Part 15

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

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 before the young pheasants have learned the trick of going into the trees to roost. Most of the pheasants living in and about the woods should go to roost by the middle of August, and only late birds may be excused if they have not acquired the roosting habit by the First. In the past the keeper was relieved of a load of anxiety if all his hand-reared birds went to tree by the First--for with the long days spent in the partridge fields he was unable to watch over his pheasants at night. But in these days, when there is so little partridge shooting in early September, the keeper has more time to give to his pheasants, and his anxieties are less, though he is always glad when his birds take to roosting out of the reach of vermin, especially of foxes--tame or wild.

Given a fair chance young pheasants soon learn to go to a perch to sleep. Where one sets a good example, others quickly follow. We remember a partridge that was reared with pheasants, and learned to go with them regularly to roost. Five-weeks-old pheasants will flutter up to roost on the first night after removal to covert. It is less difficult to induce them to seek a perch than to break them of the habit of sleeping on the ground. Pheasants have an eye rather for comfortable sleeping quarters than safe ones. Many a keeper has suffered heavy loss from putting his birds in a covert with a thick grassy undergrowth, or within reach of a field of rough grass, or a young plantation with a thick growth of rank herbage and attractive weeds. There the fox is most likely to come.