With nature and a camera

Chapter IV. Gamekeepers: their friends and foes

Cat trap

Shepherds' dogs, too, often need careful watching, as they will occasionally kill sitting hens before they can get off their nests and swallow wee "poults" in the most business-like way. I knew one great lanky conspicuous-ribbed mongrel in North Yorkshire that was guilty of this and another curious practice. He must have been of French extraction, for he would swallow young frogs as fast as he could find them.

Sheep farmers' cats often take to a feral life and do a great amount of damage amongst Grouse in the breeding season. Some five or six years ago I was out with a gamekeeper in the North of England after a Sparrow-hawk that had made her nest in a little ghyll which divided a number of heather-clad pastures that were full of sitting Grouse. In crossing one of these pastures, on our way to another part of the beat, we came upon an ominous-looking train of feathers. In one direction it led to a headless female Grouse, and in the other to a nest containing seven eggs, from three of which protruded the cold tips of little beaks. I stood by looking on in sad silence, whilst the keeper vented his rage in entirely unprintable language. We turned back into the ghyll where my companion had some steel gins hidden, and whilst he made a stone passage five or six feet long by twelve inches high and seven or eight wide, I took off my jacket and tickled a mountain trout under a moss-clad boulder. The stone passage was built on a fairly level bit of ground, close to some great loose rocks under which the feline depredator was probably hiding at the time. The trout was suspended in the middle of the passage, and a trap carefully covered with moss laid on the floor of it at either end, and the next morning that keeper avenged the headless Grouse. No cat can resist a trout as bait and no gamekeeper who knows his business ever talks about victims of this kind, or owns to having seen a cat of any colour, size, or shape on his beat.

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In the South of England, where the conditions are different, mischievous cats are caught by a trap popularly known amongst some keepers as "Bill Adams," from its terribly destructive character. It is baited with a herring and often placed on a plank thrown across a stream, as shown in our illustration. Just as pussy steps softly beneath a kind of triumphal arch, its weight releases a bit of cunning machinery, and a couple of doors swiftly close, one before and one behind, and all chance of escape is instantly cut off.

Cat trap

I recollect once seeing an old Yorkshire gamekeeper catch a Fox in a very ingenious and, I should think, ancient form of trap, which lie called a "kist," probably a corruption of chest. He had traced the animal into a hole amongst some rocks, just after a fall of snow, and barred it in by carefully walling up every means of egress.

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This done, he levelled and roughly flagged a path seven or eight feet in length, and leading straight away from the hole at which the Fox had entered. Upon this path he built a substantial passage, nine or ten inches wide by twelve or thirteen in height, which narrowed somewhat abruptly at its outer end into a mere slit through which it was impossible for the prisoner to escape. About one-third of the distance from the end of the passage, built over the hole by which Reynard had entered his lair, the stones forming the sides and roof were so arranged as to allow a heavy slate to work up and down with ease in the form of a sluice. The slate had a hole through its upper part, and to this was tied a strong piece of string which was passed over a smooth stick arranged like a trestle close to the slate, so as to suspend it in a perfectly plumb position and thus allow it to work up and down with ease. The string then ran forward to another trestle placed almost directly over the outer end of the passage, and finally ended in a small brass ring which was passed over the end of a short piece of stick protruding horizontally from the slit. Directly the Fox came forward along the passage and began to sniff the fresh air and try to widen the slit by scratching, he put his foot on the inner end of the stick and at once so depressed it that the brass ring slipped off its opposite end and released the slate, which instantly fell and effectually barred retreat to his stronghold in the rocks.

Foxes caught in this way are often shown round amongst hill farmers, who are very glad to see such inveterate enemies of their Geese in captivity, and then ruthlessly slain, or taken to some huntable part of the country and turned down in front of a pack of hounds.

A farmer, whose flock of Geese suffered severely on a Fox-infested moor in the North of England, conceived the notion that if he hung a small bell to the neck of his Gander its tinkling would scare the marauders away. The idea answered its purpose admirably for a while, but the cunning thieves soon came to understand that it was a harmless contrivance, and actually killed the bird wearing the noisy piece of metal.