I have heard of large young fowls being killed by rats at farms not far away, but I do not remember that they ever took one of our chickens; indeed, at a time when we used to see many rats there, a hen sat in the stable and safely hatched her chicks. I recollect an old rat that used to come every day to feed with the fowls without any objection to his presence on their part.
Rabbits were another great nuisance. They had burrows among the tree-roots on the river bank and no one seemed able to get them out or to shoot them, so between what they ate and what they dug up, we hadn't much pleasure in the garden. At last we cut off so much of the garden as we could surround with wire netting and left the rest to take its chance. No sooner had we done this than, for what reason I cannot tell, the rabbits disappeared completely, and for two or three years we hardly ever saw one on our own ground, though they seemed to be as plentiful as usual elsewhere.
We have sometimes caught long-tailed field-mice that were eating the peas, and the cats seemed to find voles and shrews pretty often.
I must confess to rather a weakness for common mice; they are pretty to look at and amusing in their ways. To give an instance of their ingenuity and enterprise, I remember some time in the summer of 1899, when we used to have a basin of sugar left in our room at night, a certain mouse appeared to think that it was placed there for his own special benefit, at any rate he was accustomed to help himself very freely to it. We could hear him working away to get a lump over the side of the basin, then rolling it along to the edge of the table and letting it fall to the floor, along which he would again roll it to a hole under the skirting-board. Sometimes he would take in this way as many as three or four lumps of sugar in one night. Besides the sugar there was often bread and butter left in the room between two plates, and one morning when I took the top one off out jumped the mouse. I cannot imagine how it got in. It certainly couldn't make its way out again, which one should have thought a far easier thing to do. The plates seemed to be exactly as I had left them the night before, and I could not see that any of the bread and butter had been eaten.
I remember what seems to me an extraordinary instance of a mouse's power of smelling out food. In the new parish church here (consecrated in 1885) the vestry is in the tower, and its ceiling, which is the floor of the bellringing-room, must be nearly 20 ft. from the ground. Just under this ceiling were suspended at one time three very long texts; they were drawn up by pulleys with a rope that was fastened off about six feet from the floor. One of these texts was used at harvest festivals, and a fringe of corn had been left round the border, but all three were elaborately done up together in brown paper, so that none of the corn could be seen. Happening to be at the church one day I found the caretaker had brought out these texts into the churchyard, because he had seen, he said, a mouse running up to them by the suspending cord. Sure enough, when he undid the wrapping the poor little thing was there, and I am sorry to say was promptly killed. I thought its wonderful cleverness deserved a better fate. The church was newly built with concrete floors, and there was no regular food supply to attract mice, so this particular mouse must have come in casually on the mere chance of picking up something, and it must from the floor, nearly 20 ft. below, have found out that there was corn in one of the bundles of texts behind the brown paper that covered them, and I think more wonderful still, it must have discovered the only way of reaching it, along the suspending cord.
There used to be an old piano in the Parish Room close to the new church. This was not often used and one day when we lifted the cover from the back part of the keyboard we found snugly placed in a corner of the bass notes an empty mouse's nest, quite round like a bird's, and beautifully made of dried bits of grass and coloured worsted. It seems strange that a mouse should have found such a place for its nest, and stranger still that in a new large bare room, with a solid wood-block floor, it should have been able unobserved to go in and out continually to fetch the materials for it. This it must have done, since none came from the room itself.
The long broad garden walk by the side of the house seems to be a favourite thoroughfare for hares; we constantly see them passing at all times of the year. I wish myself there were not quite so many hares in Warburton as there are. We could do very well with fewer in the gardens and orchards, and there would then be less inducement to hold such frequent public coursing meetings, which, in my opinion, we could do very well without. Some years before 1900 a large number were imported and turned down. These were at first a great annoyance to everybody, and did much damage to fruit trees even in mild open weather; it was almost unbelievable the height to which they could reach, gnawing off every bit of bark all the way round. They were, besides, far too thick upon the ground for their own comfort. I was told by a man who worked on the estate that he often came across bucks fighting together; they fought so savagely, he said, that they would hardly get out of his way, and almost knocked up against him. They begin fighting, it appears from his account, by giving slaps with their forefeet, but in the end they go on to worry at one another like dogs.