Practical Game Preserving. 



entrance of vermin in any shape, from a rat to a fox, than 

 if they were bereft of a door and had no walls. It is not 

 wonderful, then, that foxes will pay visits to such places, 

 and in some cases destroy all the luckless inmates. 



Sometimes foxes will molest ducks and geese which are 

 allowed to roam about in the fields, &c., but not very often. 

 However, when they do, the result, as a sufferer in this 

 way described his loss, is <( a terrible mess of it ;" and the 

 geese or ducks, as the case may be, are rarely attacked 

 without a loss of perhaps three parts of their number killed 

 and taken right away. But in instances of such wholesale 

 slaughter, the fox rarely removes all the bodies of the poultry 

 killed ; and if it do, some will probably be discovered at 

 no great distance, if the direction indicated by the track of 

 loose feathers as having been taken by the fox be followed 

 up, when some, if not all the victims of Reynard's visit 

 may be recovered, perhaps despoiled to so little extent as 

 to be still fit for market or table. The quantity of poultry 

 a single fox, or pair of foxes, will remove in one night to 

 some distance from the place where they were destroyed 

 is sometimes really surprising ; and an instance came under 

 our notice where two foxes, a dog and a bitch, entered a 

 certain rickety old barn used as a poultry house and killed 

 forty-seven fowls, large and small, and sixteen ducks ; 

 eleven were left in the house and the rest carried to 

 and deposited in a gorse covert nearly a mile distant 

 from the scene. Although it is a comparatively rare 

 event for more than one fox to be observed on the 

 same mischievous intent, still, especially in early spring 

 when mating is going on, two foxes will often run 



