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. J 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 ofa 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 
7 
