With nature and a camera

Chapter IV. Gamekeepers: their friends and foes

Poaching farmers

I recollect another old farmer whose greed rather than original instincts prompted him to set steel gins in watercourse-holes, through stone walls, on his farm for the Hares that used them; but he had the spirit of his enterprise broken by a good-natured keeper who, after playing off all sorts of tricks on the old fellow, ridiculed him into good behaviour by hacking off a dead Sheep's leg and putting it into one of his traps in such a way as to suggest that the animal had been caught and had torn it off.

A Hare's love of parsley is well known by most rural folks, and I remember a quarryman who turned to account this knowledge and a bit of the herb growing in his back garden which abutted on some good game ground.

I believe it is a popular belief that Rabbits do not leave their nesting burrows open during the daytime until their young ones, which are born blind and remain so for eight or nine days, can see, and that if they are touched by human hands before they have acquired the sense of sight the mother will forsake them. We have proved both these canons of rural natural history to have, at any rate, their exceptions.

In order to give some idea of the effectual manner in which a Rabbit can hide the whereabouts of its nest, we made a photograph of part of a hedge-bank with one in it before the mouth of the burrow had been opened, and another after the owner had scratched the earth away.

[page 178]

Rabbit burrow (closed)

[page 179]

Rabbit burrow (open)

[page 180]

Rabbits open their nesting burrows and suckle their young by night, closing them tightly with earth again when they leave them. I had a nest under close observation last spring, and was much interested to find that its owner scattered some old hay from a sheep foddering station close by over the mould with which she filled the entrance to the burrow every time she left it, a procedure which materially lessened its chances of being discovered.

When the small amount of earth lying patted down flat outside a Rabbit's nest, and the length and diameter of the burrow from which it has been excavated are compared, it always appears to me as if the owner must have taken some of the mould right away so as to lessen the conspicuousness of things, but I have not been able to gather any corroborative facts on this point.

During the early spring great numbers of young Rabbits are drowned in their nests through heavy rainfalls. Accidents of this kind no doubt contribute largely to keeping their numbers in this country in check, for such is the remarkable fecundity of the animal that it has been calculated a pair would, under the most favourable circumstances possible, produce not less than 1,274,840 in the short space of four years.

I have proved that they will increase the length of their nesting burrows after young ones have been born, if an injury to the thin crust of earth immediately over them should appear to jeopardise their safety. A friend of mine, on whose farm a number of Rabbits breed every year, cut the sod immediately over the nest of one away in the spring of 1896 in order to show its downy little occupants to his wife.

I visited the place a week later, and upon examination discovered that the burrow had been dug quite six inches further in, and most of the nest and young ones transferred to the new quarters. There was also a quantity of newly-excavated earth outside the mouth of the burrow. As the land in which the nest was situated was very wet, probably a leakage caused through the cutting of the sod directly over the young ones induced their mother to shift their quarters.