62 Practical Game Preserving. 



the young birds nearly ready to go out suffer accordingly. 

 Foxes, too, have their fingers in the pie pretty often amongst 

 the covert pheasants, more particularly where no rabbits are 

 permitted. But leave the conies in fairly plentiful numbers, 

 and very few birds find their death at the paws and teeth 

 of foxes. The magpie, the jay, the jackdaw particularly, 

 the crow, the rook, even more so the sparrow-hawk, et hoc 

 genus omne, each and all have their little turn at our proteges, 

 the crow, and jackdaw, and hawks, at the young of all ages, 

 the remainder at the eggs, and a considerable havoc they 

 make if allowed their own way. 



Of the means of protecting pheasants from these enemies 

 by helping the varmints to shuffle off their mortal coil in 

 as expeditious and wholesale manner as possible, we shall 

 treat later on in a thoroughly exhaustive form. Meanwhile 

 an axiom for the gamekeeper is : To destroy vermin is to 

 preserve game ; if you don't do the one, you can't the other. 



