VERMIN AND TRAPPING 95 



often remove and store in the lair of their litter 

 scores of game eggs ; but, curiously enough, they 

 leave uneaten probably nine out of every ten they 

 so take. Once an egg is broken stoats relish the 

 contents as keenly as do ferrets, yet while removing 

 eggs they are most careful not to break them. I 

 believe the explanation of their not eating stolen 

 eggs is that they cease to recognize them as fit for 

 food after the scent of the sitting bird has left them. 

 I have recovered from the lairs of stoats lots of eggs 

 in which incubation had not started, hatched them 

 under fowls, and reared birds from them after all. 



An under-keeper complained to me that fourteen 

 * cold ' pheasant eggs had disappeared from a nest 

 under some brushwood where the underwood had 

 been cut the previous winter, and he was certain 

 that the thief was a human being. I went with 

 him to reconstruct the crime. There, right enough, 

 was the empty nest not one of the dead oak-leaves 

 on which the eggs had rested disturbed ; nor could 

 I trace a sign of a human footprint. I knelt down, 

 and was feeling round the edge of the nest when 

 my finger went into a mole-hole, and against some- 

 thing hard and round and smooth. I retrieved all 

 the fourteen eggs from that mole-hole, asked for a 

 trap, set it in the nest (with twigs above to keep 

 out pheasants), and soon laid by the legs a fine 

 dog stoat. This same under-keeper learnt another 

 lesson about stoats that he had not forgotten up to 



