VERMIN AND TRAPPING IOI 
lady trespasser lodged a complaint at headquarters. 
Though I was ordered to desist, the lady did not 
come that way again, nor the dear dog that usually 
accompanied her. Hedgehogs have a bad habit of 
camping out in the field-hedges when the partridges 
are nesting. A well-schooled dog is the best means 
of getting rid of them quickly. I had an old retriever 
who brought me eleven hedgehogs out of one short 
hedge, and I never knew her to upset a sitting bird 
during the whole of her life. 
I regret to say that the last surviving pair of 
magpies in the locality where I was keepering were 
picked up in 1909 by a keeper (not myself)—that is 
to say, they were not trapped or shot, but poisoned. 
Utterly to exterminate birds so handsome may save 
a trifle of game for the gun, but surely such 
extremes of preservation can only bring upon the 
perpetrators the derision and disgust of all sane 
people. A judicious thinning of hawks and magpies 
is quite enough to satisfy the demands of any 
sportsman, and their extinction is bound to react to 
the detriment of the selfish few. In many parts 
jays, too, are getting comparatively scarce, though 
I am glad to say that, like stoats and weasels, they 
are too cunning ever to be wiped out by fair means. 
No sane keeper would wish to be without a 
sprinkling of jays in his woods, for he has no 
more vigilant and useful sentinels. In a wood 
where there are jays, neither cat nor fox nor man 
