102 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
can stir without being spotted and proclaimed. 
Jays also take a somewhat uncalled-for delight in 
mobbing a barn-owl should it get abroad in the 
day-time. 
The cunning of jays is shown particularly in their 
breeding-time. You may hunt high and low, till 
your neck aches as if it were going to break, for 
a jay’s nest which you know must be in a certain 
wood, and not find it; yet you may pass within a 
yard or so of it. You may see the old jays about 
day after day, and they may utter a derisive squawk 
every time, but never a sound will they make near 
their nest. Nor do young jays ever squawk, 
unless actually molested, till they are out of the 
nest and can fly. Then they make any amount 
of noise. If jays made a practice of eating pheasants’ 
eggs, it would be almost impossible to have any 
wild-bred pheasants, unless there were very few 
jays indeed or very many hen pheasants. In other 
words, when jays do take it into their heads to suck 
pheasants’ eggs, they keep it up at a marvellous 
rate. In one season, in one wood, I lost over 
two hundred pheasants’ eggs, their shells (each 
with a neat hole through which the contents had 
been sampled) remaining in the nests. I came to 
the conclusion that it was the work of jays, and 
rightly ; for so soon as I had trapped a pair of jays 
to pheasants’ eggs my losses entirely ceased, at 
which I was not sorry. Rabbits’ eyes or sheep’s 
