80 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 ot 
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 
