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 
