The Black List
In February the gamekeeper's thoughts and energies are turned mostly in the way of vermin and trapping. And where vermin is really plentiful it is a wonderful wild sport that he enjoys in tracking and trapping the creatures of his black list. In the North the vermin bag is more mixed than in the South, and in the olden days contained such a great variety of creatures as to suggest that the keepers enjoyed better sport than their masters. They were ruthless in their war on all that they held to be enemies to game; how ruthless may be judged from the following list of vermin, bagged in three years by a famous keeper on Glengarry, Inverness-shire. It indicates the proportion of the different sorts of animals classed as vermin found in the Highlands in the middle days of the last century: 11 foxes, 198 wild cats, 246 martens, 106 polecats, 301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 78 house cats going wild, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 blue hawks or peregrine falcons, 7 orange-legged falcons, 211 hobby hawks, 75 kites, 5 marsh harriers, 63 goshawks, 285 common buzzards, 371 rough-legged buzzards, 3 honey buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlin hawks, 83 hen harriers, 6 gerfalcons, 9 ash-coloured or long blue-tailed hawks, 1431 carrion crows, 475 ravens, 35 horned owls, 71 common fern owls (nightjars), 3 golden owls, 8 magpies. A total of nearly 5000 head, giving an average of more than 1500 head a year, or about five head a day. The list, strangely enough, does not contain a single jay, rat, or hedgehog.
