8o TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 



In this way jackdaws are worse than rooks, for 

 they have a great fancy for the brains of pheasant 

 chicks, which on occasion they will kill when 

 almost as big as themselves. I have heard of 

 localities where rooks are still innocent of meddling 

 with the eggs or young of game. No doubt rooks 

 vary in degree of crime against game, but the best 

 of those with which I have been associated were 

 bad enough. Many a time has the damage done 

 by rooks been so wholesale and so irreparable that 

 I have wished that I could gather all the rooks 

 within a radius of a hundred miles into a confined 

 mass, and open fire till the last was dead. Of 

 course, I did not always feel like that. I love 

 as much as anybody their cawing at the coming 

 of spring when the daisies open wide, the hum 

 of mowing is heard again on the lawns, and the 

 buzz of bees among the flaming crocuses. 



Some say that rooks may steal only a few early 

 pheasant eggs here and there, while as yet the 

 herbage has made no headway, and the eggs lie 

 exposed and tempting. Of course, the easier it 

 is for rooks to see eggs, the easier is it for them 

 to find them ; but at all times it is easier for 

 rooks than for men to find eggs, for they can look 

 down on them. Get on a hillside from which 

 you can look down on a dense wood, and you 

 will be surprised at its bareness from the vertical 

 view-point. Not until the days when aeroplanes 



