VERMIN AND TRAPPING 97 



hawks, on the other hand, will boldly attack any 

 bird they can kill and carry, and so are liable, but 

 not likely, to prove a scourge to the keeper after he 

 has shifted his birds to covert. 



Since kestrels are famous for killing rats and mice 

 (and, I think, much prefer to deal with mice), I do 

 not see why on occasion they should not kill small 

 leverets. One morning in the month of March I 

 came upon a leveret just killed, by the side of a track 

 through some young wood ; blood was oozing from 

 its head, but not as if a stoat or weasel had bitten it. 

 I set a trap to it, in which, returning in about ten 

 minutes, I found a kestrel. I reset the trap, and 

 very soon caught that kestrel's mate. I have seen 

 a cock sparrow-hawk fly away from the carrion 

 carcass of a rat, which evidently it had been eating. 

 Another sparrow-hawk, a hen, I came upon as it 

 was eating a greenfinch in the bottom of a dell 

 when a winter wind was blowing. A French 

 partridge flew across the corner of a wood, and I 

 shot it ; just as I pulled the trigger a sparrow-hawk 

 arrived, evidently in pursuit, so I got rather an 

 unusual right and left. Another sparrow-hawk, an 

 adult bird, did a funny thing. I was sitting in a hut 

 in a clump of trees waiting for pigeons. The hawk 

 came in and perched behind the trunk of a Scotch 

 fir. A few minutes afterwards a pigeon came, and 

 I shot it sitting in a tree within a few yards of the 

 sparrow-hawk, which never budged till I went to 



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