FAMILY PARTIES 29 



The stoat is doubtless one of the most dangerous enemies, 

 though even his ravages are exaggerated. In our recent 

 experience a stoat, carrying a full-grown partridge as if the 

 weight had been nothing, almost ran into a pedestrian on 

 the open road, before he saw his danger and left the partridge 

 for his enemy's meal. 



It has been feared that the partridge was gradually dis- 

 appearing from England, except where preservation was, if 

 one may use the word, intensive. The stocks were certainly 

 almost annihilated on some of the clay-lands, where shooting 

 is in the hands of the farmers, and keepers are unknown. 

 Probably, too, its multiplication is a little checked by the 

 mechanical precision of farming operations, and the want of 

 good cover, but one favourable season restores the numbers 

 even in some of the less congenial neighbourhoods. 



There is one other enemy of the partridge, and indeed of 

 several other birds, which must be mentioned. One windy 

 day in 191 1, a body of sportsmen saw a covey, which had not 

 been shot at, fly straight into the wires along the road from 

 Huntingdon to Cambridge ; and four fell dead. Along one 

 mile of railway in this neighbourhood, Mr. Alington, one of 

 the greatest authorities on the partridge, calculated that some 

 100 birds were killed by the wires every year. There are 

 poachers who deliberately make use of the wires. A certain 

 farmer in Westmorland, in his unregenerate days, made 

 many a good bag out of a new line of wires running across 

 the moor. He would wait till dusk when the grouse were 

 jugging ; and then flush them from close quarters with his 

 dog. In their alarm and blindness, they would dash straight 

 into the wires, and it was a rare evening when he did not 

 pick up several victims. 



Probably partridges, like wheat, would die out over great 

 areas of the country, if left to themselves, and if keepers dis- 



