Wild Hunters
With what regret I found dead in one of my rat-traps not the villain of the piece which had been stealing my potatoes but a full-grown stoat spruce in chestnut and white ! Stoats will follow up the rat-runs and so the policeman suffered for the buriler. My regret was not only for what Sir Thomas Browne called " the handsomenesse of the same " but because, provided you don't keep poultry, stoats (or " stoits" as they are called locally) and weasels are an unqualified boon to the gardener. Since gamekeepering went into a decline, stoat and weasel have notably increased their numbers, and in a stupid trapping hunt over 100 acres in front of my house the distribution worked out at about one per acre. Both stoat and weasel seem to hunt mainly in .the morning, unlike the fox that hunts by night and the cat gone wild that hunts incorrigibly by day and night. You can generally identify a cat's work by a pile of feathers such as the fox does not leave. Stoats and weasels will, of course, take fledglings, but I doubt whether they are anything like so destructive to birds as carrion crows or " gor-crows," as the locals call them. A pair of crows will systematically beat a hedgerow, one on either side of it like dogs, and no partridge chicks have a chance. They will drill a neat hole in their game to reach the kidneys.. It would be interesting to have statistics of what proportion of lambs killed by wild hunters are one of twins, for a ewe will defend her single lamb. Probably stray dogs account for more sheep than all the professional predators.
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