The keeper also destroys owls—on suspicion. Now and then some one argues with the keeper, assuring him that they do not touch game, but this he regards as pure sentimentalism. “Look at his beak,” is his steady reply. “Tell me that that there bill weren’t made to tear a bird’s breast to bits? Just see here—all crooked and pointed: why, an owl have got a hooked bill like an eagle. It stands to reason as he must be in mischief.” So the poor owls are shot and trapped, and nailed to the side of the shed.
But upon the crow the full vials of the keeper’s wrath are poured, and not without reason. The crow among birds is like the local professional among human poachers: he haunts the place and clears everything—it would be hard to say what comes amiss to him. He is the impersonation of murder. His long, stout, pointed beak is a weapon of deadly power, wielded with surprising force by the sinewy neck. From a tiny callow fledgling, fallen out of the thrush’s nest, to the partridge or a toothsome young rabbit, it is all one to him. Even the swift leveret is said sometimes to fall a prey, being so buffeted by the sooty wings of the assassin and so blinded by the sharp beak striking at his eyes as to be presently overcome. For the crow has a terrible penchant for the morsel afforded by another’s eyes: I have seen the skull of a miserable thrush, from which a crow rose and slowly sailed away, literally split as if by a chisel—doubtless by the blow that destroyed its sight. Birds that are at all diseased or weakly, as whole broods sometimes are in wet unkindly seasons, rabbits touched by the dread parasite that causes the fatal “rot,” the young pheasant straying from the coop, even the chicken at the lone farmstead, where the bailiff only lives and is in the fields all day—these are the victims of the crow.
Crows work almost always in pairs—it is remarkable that hawks, jays, magpies, crows, nearly all birds of prey, seem to remain in pairs the entire year—and when they have once tasted a member of a brood, be it pheasant, partridge, or chicken, they stay till they have cleared off the lot. Slow of flight and somewhat lazy of habit, they will perch for hours on a low tree, croaking and pruning their feathers; they peer into every nook and corner of the woodlands, not like the swift hawk, who circles over and is gone and in a few minutes is a mile away. So that neither the mouse in the furrow nor the timid partridge cowering in the hedge can escape their leering eyes.
Therefore the keeper smites them hip and thigh whenever he finds them; and if he comes across the nest, placed on the broad top of a pollard-tree—not in the branches, but on the trunk—sends his shot through it to smash the eggs. For if the young birds come to maturity they will remain in that immediate locality for months, working every hedge and copse and ditch with cruel pertinacity. In consequence of this unceasing destruction the crow has become much rarer of late, and its nest is hardly to be found in many woods. They breed in the scattered trees of the meadows and fields, especially where no regular game preservation is attempted, and where no keeper goes his rounds. Even to this day a lingering superstition associates this bird with coming evil; and I have heard the women working in the fields remark that such and such a farmer then lying ill would not recover, for a crow had been seen to fly over his house but just above the roof-tree.
Trespassers give him a good deal of trouble, for a great wood seems to have an irresistible attraction for all sorts of semi-Bohemians, besides those who come for poaching purposes. The keeper thinks it much more difficult to watch a wood like this, which is continuous and all in one, than it is to guard a number of detached plantations, though in the aggregate they may cover an equal area. It is impossible to see into it any distance; to walk round it is a task of time. A poacher may slink from tree to tree and from thicket to thicket, and, unless the dogs chance to sniff him out, may lie hidden in tangled masses of fern and bramble, while the keeper passes not ten yards away. But plantations laid out in regular order with broad open spaces, sometimes with small fields between, do not afford anything like cover for human beings. If a man is concealed in one of these copses, and finds that the keeper or his assistants are about to go through it, he must move or be caught; and in moving he has to pass across an open space, and is nearly sure to be detected. In a continuous wood of large extent, if he hears the keepers coming he has but to slip as rapidly and silently as possible to one side, and often has the pleasure to see them pass right over the spot where only recently he was lying.
Therefore, although a wood is much more beautiful from an artistic point of view, with its lovely greens in spring and yellow and browns in autumn, its shades and recesses and fern-strewn glades, yet if a gentleman desires to imitate the monarch who laid out the New Forest and plant wood, and his object be simply game, the keeper is of opinion that the somewhat stiff and trim plantations are preferable. They are generally of fir; and fir is the most difficult of trees to slip past, being decidedly of an obstructive turn. The boughs grow so close to the ground that unless you crawl you cannot go under them. The trunks—unlike those of many other trees—will flourish so near together that the extremities of the branches touch and almost interweave, and they are rough and unpleasant to push through. To shoot or trap, or use a net or other poacher’s implement, is very difficult in a young fir plantation, because of this thickness of growth; so that in a measure the tree itself protects the game. Then the cover afforded is warm and liked by the birds; and so for many reasons the fir has become a great favourite, notwithstanding that it is of very little value when finally cut down.
For fox preserving firs are hardly so suitable, because the needles, or small sharp leaves, quite destroy all undergrowth—not only by the turpentine they contain, but by forming a thick mat, as it were, upon the earth. This mass of needles takes years, to all appearance, to decay, and no young green blade or shoot can get through it; besides which the fir-boughs above make a roof almost impenetrable to air and light, the chief necessities of a plant’s existence. Foxes like a close warm undergrowth, such as furze, sedges when the ground is dry, the underwood that springs up between the ash-stoles. Although constantly out of doors—if such a phrase be allowable—foxes seem to dislike cold and draught, as do weasels and all their kind, notably ferrets. But for pure game preserving, and for convenience of watching, the keeper thinks the detached plantations of fir preferable. Doubtless he is professionally right; and yet somehow a great wood seems infinitely more English and appeals to the heart far more powerfully, with its noble oaks and beeches and ash trees, its bramble-thickets and brake, and endless beauties which a life of study will not exhaust.
But the semi-Bohemians detested by the keeper do not prowl about the confines of a wood with artistic views; their objects are extremely prosaic, and though not always precisely injurious, yet they annoy him beyond endurance. He is like a spider in the centre of a vast spreading web, and the instant the most outlying threads—in this case represented by fences—are broken he is all agitation till he has expelled the intruder. Men and boys in the winter come stealing into the wood where the blackthorn thickets are for sloes, which are reputed to be improved by the first frosts, and are used for making sloe gin, etc. Those they gather they sell, of course; and although the pursuit may be perfectly harmless in itself, how is the keeper to be certain that, if opportunity offered, these gentry would not pounce upon a rabbit or anything else? Others come for the dead wood; and it does on the face of it seem hard to deny an old woman who has worked all her days in the field a bundle of fallen branches rotting under the trees. The accumulations of such dead sticks in some places are astonishing: the soil under the ash-poles must slowly rise from the mass of decaying wood and ultimately become greatly enriched by this natural manure.
When a hard clay soil is revealed by the operations for draining a meadow, and the crust of black or reddish mould on which the sweet green grass flourishes is seen to be but spade-deep, the idea naturally occurs that that thin crust must have been originated by some similar process to what is now going on in the ash wood. Those six or nine inches of mould perhaps represent several centuries of forest. But if the keeper admits the old woman shivering over her embers in the cottage to pick up these dead boughs, how can he tell what further tricks others may be up to? The privilege has often been offered and as often abused, until at last it has been finally withdrawn—not only because of the poaching carried on under the cloak of picking up dead wood, but because the intruders tore down fine living branches from the trees and spoiled and disfigured them without mercy. Sometimes gentlemen go to the expense of having wood periodically gathered and distributed among the poor, which is a considerate system and worthy of imitation where possible.
Occasionally men come to search for walking-sticks, for which there is now a regular trade. Just at present “natural” sticks—that is, those cut from the stem with the bark on—are rather popular, both for walking and for umbrella handles, which causes this kind of search to be actively prosecuted. The best “natural” sticks are those which when growing were themselves young trees, sprung up direct from seed or shoots—saplings, which are stronger and more pliant than those cut from a stole or pollard. To cut such a stick as this is equivalent to destroying a future tree, and of course a good deal of mischief may be easily done in a short time.