COUNTRY LIFE
AN agreeable amusement if the ground is ever covered with snow is the study of spores or slots. They disclose much that may be un- expected. One day this century, for example, I found that a hare had come right up to the balcony of the house, that a stray dog had put his feet on the bird-table and (on another occasion) that quantities of birds had come down to drink at one shallow bay of the little river and that rabbits had climbed up a circle of mesh wire. Inci- dentally it was once discovered at the Whipsnade Zoo that foxes had climbed a wire a good ten feet high. This known capacity of foxes—and in a much weaker degree by rabbits—was countered (at the partridge Research Station of the I.C.I.) by a comparatively low mesh-wire fence of which the upper half was left as loose as possible. The foxes could not face the wobble and rabbits would probably not climb any but a stiff wire. One of the great experts on slots, Malcolm Seton, used to keep certain little platforms and a narrow plank-bridge scattered with fine sand. He could read, as in a printed page, the evidence of the little feet of birds and mammals. That was in his wonderful wooded and watered park near New York.
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