“Long-necked Heron, dread of nimble eels.”
Leyden.
“Unhappy bird! our fathers’ prime delight,
Who fenced thine eyry round with sacred laws,
Nor mighty princes now disdain to wear
Thy waving crest, the mark of high command.”
Somerville.
But the gamekeeper’s enormities reach their climax when he murders that noble bird the heron. His master perhaps has a field or two that runs down to a stream, and in the advertisement, by which the thrifty farmer makes annually a few pounds, of “so many acres of shooting to let,” there is added, the “right of fishing in the river so-and-so.” So if by any chance a poor heron, strayed from the upper reaches where some nobleman or gentleman preserves this fine bird, comes on the farmer’s meadows, the farmer’s gamekeeper (it is sport exactly to his taste) stalks it from behind the line of willows and kills it as it stands there. He will probably get a shilling for it from the birdstuffer, and that is quite enough reason to him for destroying the heron. It is a great pity these miserable men are allowed to fire anything but blank cartridge. On the larger estates the head-gamekeeper is often a man of intelligence and a sound naturalist, and owls and kestrels are not murdered, and the heron, of course, goes free. But on either side of him may be a farmer who keeps a “gamekeeper” who steals eggs and young birds from his aristocratic neighbours, so that his master may let his “shooting” to some “city gents from London,” and who, though there maybe a heronry on the adjoining estate, kills the birds when he gets the chance, because, as he says, he has to “preserve the fishing,” but really because he can get a few pence for its skin. Sometimes a heron appears in a poulterer’s shop and finds a purchaser who is curious in matters of eating[B] and wishes to taste a fowl that once was so highly prized as to be the dish of honour in the game course at banquets of State.
[B] The proper sauce for it, by the way, was gamelyn or cameline, which, we are told, was “a dainty Italian sauce, composed of nuts, bread-crumbs, ginger, cinnamon and vinegar.”
But there are not, I fancy, many men, except farmers’ “gamekeepers” and their confederates the so-called “naturalists”,
