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 
