MOOR MANAGEMENT 323 



other than natural causes, and the facts and surrounding Strongyle 

 circumstances of over two hundred separate outbreaks of disease, 



the Committee arrived at the conclusion that the Strongyle f< 

 worm, and the Strongyle worm alone, is the immediate causa Disease." 

 causans of adult " Grouse Disease." l 



The Inquiry did not confine its energies merely to restating 

 the theory advanced by Dr Cobbold in 1873. It put the question 

 to the test by proving not only that Grouse under certain 

 specified conditions die by an over-infection of the Strongyle 

 worm, but also that healthy birds can be artificially infected 

 with overdoses of the worm in its larval form, and that, provided 

 the doses are sufficiently often repeated, the bird so treated 

 will die with all the recognised symptoms of true " Grouse 

 Disease." 



In addition to the examination of the caeca or blind guts of 

 diseased birds, the Committee paid very close attention to the 

 intestines of healthy birds, with the result that over 95 per 

 cent, of the birds examined have proved to be infected with 

 the Strongyle worm ; that is to say, that almost every bird on 

 a moor contains in its body under normal conditions the immedi- 

 ate cause of " Grouse Disease," and is to a greater or less extent 

 an agent for the dissemination of that scourge. 



If we admit the truth of these statements, and close perusal 

 of the preceding chapters will make it difficult not to do so, 

 we see at once that we have in the Grouse, not -a bird free from 

 all the ills that flesh is heir to, struck down in thousands at no 

 infrequent intervals when the gods are unkind, but rather an 

 unfortunate moor-fowl, carrying in its body an inherent liability 

 to disease which only requires certain specified conditions to 

 develop and turn the hardiest of all game birds into a badly- 

 feathered, rusty piner, scarcely able to fly, and ripe for death. 



What the conditions are that make this latent and endemic 

 evil assume an epidemic or partly epidemic form is a subject 

 which is all-important to moor-owners, and on the correct 



1 N.. Coccidiosis (chap, ix.), the most common cause of mortality in Grouse 

 chicks can rarely be described as the direct cause of the death of adult birds. 



