18 A GAMEKEEPER'S NOTE-BOOK 



In February the gamekeeper's thoughts and energies 

 are turned mostly in the way of vermin and trapping. 



And^where vermin is really plentiful it is 

 The Black a won( j er ful wild sport that he enjoys in 



tracking and trapping the creatures of his 

 black list. In the North the vermin bag is more 

 mixed than in the South, and in the olden days con- 

 tained such a great variety of creatures as to suggest 

 that the keepers enjoyed better sport than their 

 masters. They were ruthless in their war on all 

 that they held to be enemies to game ; how ruthless 

 may be judged from the following list of vermin, 

 bagged in three years by a famous keeper on Glen- 

 garry, Inverness-shire. It indicates the proportion 

 of the different sorts of animals classed as vermin 

 found in the Highlands in the middle days of the last 

 century : 11 foxes, 198 wild cats, 246 martens, 106 

 polecats, 301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 

 78 house cats going wild, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 

 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 blue hawks or pere- 

 grine falcons, 7 orange-legged falcons, 211 hobby 

 hawks, 75 kites, 5|marsh harriers, 63 goshawks, 285 

 common buzzards, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 3 

 honey buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlin hawks, 83 

 hen harriers, 6 gerfalcons, 9 ash-coloured or long blue- 

 tailed hawks, 1431 carrion crows, 475 ravens, 35 

 horned owls, 71 common fern owls (nightjars), 3 

 golden owls, 8 magpies. A total of nearly 5000 

 head, giving an average of more than 1500 head a 

 year, or about five head a day. The list, strangely 



