r00 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
more harm to game nests, than most people imagine. 
One may detect the work of a hedgehog at a nest 
by the clumsy havoc—there is the wide passage 
through the herbage, and the eggs are partly eaten 
and the remains mixed with the rooted-up material 
of the nest (which seems to suggest that the insects 
that lurk beneath the nest are thought as much of as 
the eggs). Still, there is no getting away from the 
fact that a hedgehog invariably falls to an egg-bait 
‘pure and simple. Though eggs or carrion answer 
admirably, there is no bait more effective for trapping 
hedgehogs than the carcasses of those hogs that have 
gone before. In fairness to hedgehogs, it should be 
stated that they come more freely to matured than 
to fresh bait, not only because of the former’s stronger 
scent, but for the sake of the maggots it produces 
and the beetles it attracts. All the same, this is not 
evidence that hedgehogs do not like eggs, and even 
birds. I heard of a proved instance in which a 
hedgehog attacked pheasants in a coop, and killed 
the fowl foster-mother by gnawing out her entrails. 
During my first season as a keeper of pheasants 
I found there were many hedgehogs in the woods. 
I got a hundred and forty odd that season. One 
tunnel-trap at an angle of one of the coverts accounted 
for forty-four, There passed by this trap a ride, up 
which people were not supposed to walk, so I set to 
work to print HEDGEHOGs in an elaborate design with 
the ones I caught, and made splendid progress till a 
