44 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



take the keenest delight in the safe hatching off of 

 any sitting partridges they ' knows on ' who are 

 responsible for the destruction of scores of nests. 

 Tenant farmers who take the greatest possible in- 

 terest in the winged game on their farms ; shepherds 

 who would consider the advisability of pole-axing 

 their dog if they knew it to interfere with a sitting 

 bird ; carters and waggoners whose rhetorical 

 powers are in evidence mainly during their descrip- 

 tions of the gigantic coveys they have flushed, who 

 will take almost as much trouble in rescuing little 

 birds from the danger of the whirring knives of 

 grass-mowers and self-binders as they would their 

 own children ; and general farm-labourers, the 

 hobby of whose lives is sport, who are almost to a 

 man honorary keepers on the farms whereon they 

 work none of these can avoid the innocent de- 

 struction of many nests. Nine partridge nests out 

 of ten found when grass is being cut for hay are 

 churned into a pitiful mass of feathers and broken 

 eggs, the close-sitting hen often being gashed to 

 pieces. The thousands of eggs thus wasted each 

 year constitute a heavy tax on the reproductive 

 efforts of partridges. 



For nesting sites there may be generous hedge- 

 rows, marking the boundaries of the fields. In 

 them it may be difficult for men to see the nests, 

 but it is the easiest thing in the world for ground 

 vermin to find them. In the absence of other 



