THE NEW FORESTRY. II 



The expedients to which owners and their foresters are 

 sometimes driven to protect plantations from destruction by 

 rabbits are pitiable. Wire-netting fences, as usually set up, are 

 useless and expensive, and a substitute is provided by dealers 

 in the shape of an offensive mixture with which plantations are 

 expected to be smeared annually by men with brushes. One 

 of these vendors issues a long list of noblemen and gentlemen 

 who patronise him, with testimonials from their foresters as to 

 the excellence of his mixture, the price of which alone would 

 be prohibitive. One does not know which to deplore most, 

 the mismanagement that suggests such futile measures or the 

 forestry that has anything to do with them. And all these 

 evils arise from perfectly preventable causes, because, as has 

 been proved, there are no kind of vermin more easily exter- 

 minated than rabbits, if followed up for a short period ; and 

 had gamekeepers only been one tithe as anxious in regard to 

 rabbits as they have been in their ghastly failures in pheasant 

 rearing, they could have provided ample sport for the gun in 

 rabbit warrens properly managed, and saved their employers 

 enormous losses in their woods. All that the proprietor needs 

 to do is to decide what areas he will devote to the preservation 

 of rabbits for sport or profit, and make it a condition with his 

 keeper that they shall exist nowhere else. Nothing else than 

 a rule of this kind with a class of ignorant and careless servants, 

 or legislation as on the Continent, will save our woods from 

 damage at any time sufficient to turn the scale between profit 

 and loss. At present the woods and game are brought into 

 frequent conflict, instead of working smoothly together as they 

 should do, seeing how closely they are connected, and pro- 

 prietors do not receive the benefit or satisfaction from either 

 that they ought to have, and in many cases it would be better 

 if, instead of working the two departments on a system of 

 hopeless compromise, they were to stock their woods with 

 game to their fullest capacity and abandon them to sport 

 altogether. 



Here is a description of what usually goes on wherever 

 game, and particularly pheasants, are preserved to any con- 

 siderable extent, and where the keeper's object is to show a 

 good head of game regardless of the general interests of the 

 estate. From March till midsummer as little work as possible 

 must be permitted in the woods, because the pheasants are 

 either laying or hatching ; from midsummer till October the 

 coverts must be kept quiet and free from intrusion in case the 

 birds should be scared off the ground ; and from October till 



