Part 7

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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.