88 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



he has never shot a bird in his Hfe! He allowed it to 

 be done because he wanted pheasants for his sporting 

 friends to have their shoot in October, and he supposed 

 that his keeper knew best what should be done. 



Another instance, also on a great estate of a great 

 nobleman in southern England. Throughout a long 

 mid-June day I heard the sound of firing in the woods, 

 beginning at about eight o'clock in the morning and 

 lasting until dark. The shooters ranged over the whole 

 woods; I had never, even in October, heard so much 

 firing on an estate in one day. I enquired of several 

 persons, some employed on the estate, as to the mean- 

 ing of all this firing, and was told that the keeper was 

 ridding the woods of some of the vermin. More than 

 that they refused to say ; but by-and-by I found a person 

 to tell me just what had happened. The head keeper 

 had got twenty or thirty persons, the men with guns 

 and a number of lads with long poles with hooks to 

 pull nests down, and had set himself to rid the woods 

 of birds that were not wanted. All the nests found, of 

 whatever species, were pulled down, and all doves, wood- 

 peckers, nuthatches, blackbirds, missel and song thrushes, 

 shot; also chaffinches and many other small birds. The 

 keeper said he was not going to have the place swarm- 

 ing with birds that were no good for anything, and 

 were always eating the pheasants' food. The odd thing 

 in this case was that the owner of the estate and his 

 son, a distinguished member of the House of Commons, 

 are both great bird-lovers, and at the very time that 

 this hideous massacre in mid-June was going on they 



