THE GAMEKEEPER'S "BLACK LIST."
FEBRUARY and March, under the modern system of game preservation, have come to be the months in which the gamekeeper devotes his chief energies to trapping. They are the months which lie between two distinct periods in the keeper's year, the breeding season and the shooting season. Shooting ends on February 1st, and nesting does not begin till April, so that the eight or nine week's which precede the very exacting months of work on the rearing- field or among the partridge-nests come naturally as a period of preparation and general clearing up. The keeper, to begin with, has to catch up pheasants to complete his stock for the aviary; he will probably have caught all the cocks he needs already, but he usually has more difficulty With the hen% Above all, he 'sets before himself the duty of ridding his ground of all creatures' which can be claised as vermin,= that is, from his point of view,- for not all keepers igree-on the subject. Probably moat Modern keeperi would not agree with their grandfathers. The vermin-pole, or "keeper's museum," or "keeper's larder," .whatever it may be called, of to-day contains fewer harmless creatures than • once it did. Education and the Orders of County Councils have had their effect, and though here and there an ignorant man may shoot a young cuckoo, believing it to be a sparrow- hawk, or may wage a foolish (and illegal) warfare against owls, keepers as a rule are better naturalists than they used to be, and less apt to destroy without knowledge and without reason.
But the number of creatures on the " black list," or, so to speak, under police supervision, still requires scrutiny and restriction. If the catalogue of the proscribed is to be taken from all over the country, it will begin in Scotland with foxes, and will continue with stoats, weasels, hedgehogs, rats, cats, rooks, crows, hawks, jays, jackdaws, and magpies. Owls, fortunately, are forbidden by law, or they might suffer more than they do. They are rightly protected over the whole country throughout the year, not only because they are beautiful and interesting birds. but because of the enormous amount of good they do in devouring mice and young rats. Unfortunately one of the owls, the brown owl, occasionally forsakes his good habits and takes to a diet of young pheasants. It is only a stray brown owl here and there which seems to decide on a change of food, and it is only when the pheasants are quite young, say for one month in the year, that the stray owl can do harm; during the other eleven months he does good. But the good he does has not been enough to protect him or others, like the white owl and the long-eared owl, from persecu- tion ; and the law very properly has stepped in to make the destruction of any owl a punishable offence. Kestrels, which are also protected in some counties because of their services in killing mice, change their habits occasionally as the brown owl does. There may be six pairs of kestrels on a game estate, and five of them will do no harm whatever; then one pair, perhaps nesting near the rearing-field, may discover that pheasant chicks are more easily come by than field-mice; and if a kestrel happens to be shot in the act of carrying off a young pheasant, it is difficult to convince the keeper that kestrels as a rule are innocent and useful birds. As for the sparrowhawk, no keeper would listen to a word in his defence. Doubtless he is destructive in the chicken-run as well as the pheasantry ; but the farmer, if not the keeper, might remember that it is due to the destruction of the sparrow- hawks as much as to any other cause that he is plagued with the enormous and unmanageable flocks of wood-pigeons which do so much damage to his growing crops. Hawks are the pigeon's natural enemy, and the increase of wood-pigeons is only another instance of the evil consequences of upsetting the natural balance of wild life.
Jays, no doubt, and magpies do a good deal of damage to the smaller birds which nest in woods, though perhaps the amount of harm they do to nesting pheasants and partridges is exaggerated. They, again, do a great deal of good out of the nesting season by the destruction of quantities of slugs, snails, and grubs, and are handsome birds with amusing habits. But the bird which suffers most at the hands of some game- keepers, and which other keepers, in turn, defend as abso- lutely harmless, is the rook. About jackdaws and carrion crows, the rook's relations, there is no doubt ; they do a certain amount of good, and the jackdaw's clatter is a welcome and merry noise ; but jackdaws and crows are both of them chicken-thieves and egg-thieves, and belong neither to farm- yards nor pheasantries. The rook, on the other hand, is one of the farmer's greatest friends. The quantities of wireworm and other pestilent grubs which he will consume are pro- digious, and the sound of a rookery in spring, and the sight of the noble processions of birds winging their way to their roosting-trees in the winter afternoons, are two of the happiest possessions of all the countryside. But rooks, like owls, seem occasionally to be urged by unnatural appetites, and when once they have acquired a taste for eggs and for young birds, they are no kinder neighbours to pheasants than carrion or hooded crows. They get the bad habit, probably, in very dry weather through sheer difficulty in finding food. But the rook is a local and home-loving bird, and though a few rooks in a particular quarter may have developed into egg-eaters, fifty, miles away, perhaps, the keeper's museum never sees a rook from one year's end to _another. : . The wild life .of the woods loses a- - good deal of its
attractiveness from the naturalist's point of view, in places where " vermin " are very severely kept down ; but nothing is more noticeable than the vitality and persistence of the smaller wild creatures, even in the face of the most deter- mined trapping. Throughout the whole of England, of course, many of the most interesting of predaceous creatures have disappeared ; the wild cat and the pine-marten are no more, and you cannot, in an ordinary country walk, be pretty sure of watching a hen-barrier hunting along the side of a hill or in the neighbourhood of crofters' cottages, as you may in some parts of Scotland and the West of Ireland, where the peasants' name for the harrier is chicken- hawk. But the stoat and the weasel have survived the marten and the polecat, and though in some districts the little weasel has been pretty nearly exterminated, in others no amount of trapping, apparently, results in lessening the numbers of stoats. When they get reduced to a certain proportion, the life of the district seems to strike a rough balance, and the gamekeeper's list of vermin destroyed each season shows about the same figures every year. It is true that stoats and weasels have no objection to partridges and pheasants as food, and, indeed, when once weasels get into the mole-runs on the rearing-field, the keeper must trap them mercilessly if he wishes to keep his birds at all. But it is true also that these graceful, savage little creatures are the greatest enemies in existence of rats, and that they account for enormous quantities of field-mice and voles. Wherever weasels have been nearly exterminated, as they have been in parts of Sussex, the damage done by plagues of voles has sometimes been prodigious.
Hedgehogs manage to live through the most persistent trapping ; on some estates they are even increasing. The killing off of a certain number every year apparently leaves the fittest and most prolific surviving. But the creature who defies every effort of the gamekeeper and the farmer, trapping, shooting, and poisoning, is the rat. In addition to being one of the bravest and fiercest creatures in the world, it is omnivorous, and its powers of reproduction are appalling. Thirteen is a common number for the litter, and of these six will probably be does. A doe rat may have a litter when she is three months old, and after that another litter every six weeks through all the seasons of the year, even in the hardest frost. An easy calculation shows that if each member of each litter survives, the progeny of a single pair of rats in a year would mount up to something over twenty-five thousand. But statistics as to rats are terrifying things. In some counties, Sussex for example, rats are increasing. Sussex has an area of 1,458 square miles. Allowing one rat for each acre—and that is certainly under the mark—that means that there was a breeding stock of 933,120 rats— say a million for the county—at the beginning of the year. Taking the number of parent doe rats at half-a-million, and multiplying that number by 2-5,000, you get the interesting figure of 12,500,000,000 stock rats to start 1911 with ; and though that calculation is absurd, what is certain is that there are more rata in Sussex than there were. If each of a million rats only did one pennyworth of damage in the year, that would still be a loss in one county alone of over £4,000. And the loss and damage are likely to increase. The rat's natural enemies are being killed off, and no artificial remedy can keep pace with him. Two odd points remain. One is that an increase of rats does not seem to be balanced, as it is with other animals, by a counteracting disease which comes of overcrowding. The other is the passing of the village rat- catcher. Modern houses and cottages are built rat-proof, and the rat-catcher's occupation in the village is gone. He is badly wanted at present in the fields and woods, but when the best rat-catcher of all goes there catching rats he is generally caught himself, and when he is trapped and dead he looks very like a weasel.
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