CHAPTER XI

FOXES AND GAME-PRESERVING

By Eric Parker

FOXES eat many kinds of food, from geese to blackberries, and it might be interesting to try to analyse the sources from which their food is obtained. I believe that most of it is provided by the game preserver. In Scotland and the North foxes of the moors and hills eat grouse and hares, and in England pheasants, partridges, and rabbits, besides smaller fare such as rats, frogs, and beetles. Of course, they kill poultry when they can, as every Master and Hunt Secretary knows, but who can doubt that farmers and poultry-keepers are indebted to the owner of shootings? If there were no partridges or rabbits the supply of food for vixens and cubs would be immensely reduced, and foxes might devote more attention to chickens and possibly lambs. The game preserver is the Hunt’s benefactor.

Or he may be. Everybody knows that not all gamekeepers in all parts of England, even in hunting countries, respect foxes. In some localities there are no packs of hounds. In others, particularly in the neighbourhood of towns, or in what auctioneers call residential districts, the Master seldom or never brings his hounds to draw the coverts. In thickly wooded country it is impossible to get a fox away, and as most hunting men want a ride such places are avoided. So that enmity to foxes may be a keeper’s necessity or misfortune rather than his fault. And I think more often than not misfortune is the right term, for a good gamekeeper is a sportsman first of all, and apart altogether from the pound or two he may get for finds, likes his neighbours to enjoy their own form of sport, even if it may be at the expense of his. If he provides a fox for a run, he shares with his employer the pleasure of a host.

That the damage done to a shooting by foxes can be very considerable there can be no question. For all that, foxes are sometimes blamed for damage done by other animals, and sometimes for sins which they have not committed. Cur dogs can be the worst of culprits. I have myself seen a terrier leaving a field in which I found between twenty and thirty young pheasants just killed or dying. Or to take a single point which has to do with the farmer rather than the gamekeeper, foxes are said to attack lambs. They may do so in the North, but seldom in the South. I know a Sussex shepherd who has seen a fox carry off a lamb alive, but much more often, I believe, the remains of lambs found in foxes’ earths are those of dead animals thrown aside by the shepherd. And the shepherd himself, too, is not always blameless if foxes take an interest in the neighbourhood of lambing pens, for, if at lambing-time he throws cleanings outside the pen, what more natural than for foxes to wind them?

But recognising the plain fact that foxes are enemies of game, it is still possible for the game-preserver and his keeper to take precautions which will enable foxes, pheasants, and partridges to exist on the same estate. To deal with pheasants first, the rearing-field can be surrounded with wire-netting. The netting must be sufficiently high. Six feet is not always enough, for if the wire sags and the fox can get a good run at it, he can get over. I remember being told by a game farmer in a non-hunting country of a remarkable sight he once saw from his bedroom window early in the morning. His keeper was rushing madly round the pen, and he realised that he was chasing a fox which had somehow climbed the six-foot wire. It sounds incredible, but the man caught the fox and killed it by dashing it on the ground.

But game farmers, like gamekeepers, know the right way with foxes and wire-netting. Eight feet is not too high. The bottom six inches should be below ground, the best way being to turn over a single furrow with a plough, plant the wire, and tread the furrow back again. The top of the wire can be bent outwards to give extra protection, but I doubt whether it is necessary. Seven feet is a long climb, and if the mesh of the netting is wide I question whether a fox could scale it.

A fox can be kept out of a pen, but it is more difficult to prevent him doing damage in covert. When the young birds are first removed to the woods, they are apt to “jug” or roost on the ground rather than go up into the trees. Not everyone knows how natural it is for pheasants to roost on the ground. In a heather county, such as parts of Hampshire, for instance, wild pheasants prefer to sleep in the heather rather than on the tree boughs, and hand-reared birds will do the same. But if there are foxes about it is essential that the young birds should be taught to go up to roost. One of the best ways of ensuring that they should do so is to build rough platforms among trees suitable for roosting, and to place the foster mother hen in her coop on the platform. Thus the young birds are taught to fly up and down, and so get used to going up into the tree branches.

Foxes in covert or near it can also be scared with lamps. A lamp hung on a plain roasting-jack fastened to a tree branch or an iron standard about two feet from the ground, throws a revolving light which foxes will not come near, and the lamp can be made more effective if one of its glasses is red.

Partridges are more difficult to protect than pheasants. They are wild birds which nest where they please, and if a fox finds the nest that is the end not only of the sitting bird in May or June but of the covey which might have been there in September. And it is not wholly true, as has sometimes been stated, that a sitting partridge gives out no scent. For the first few days on which she goes down on her eggs, she is practically scentless, so long as she keeps still. But if she moves off to feed, she must leave a trail out and back; and later, when the eggs are chipping and she is sitting high on the nest with her feathers fluffed out to give the hatching chicks room and air, the scent she throws is so strong that a passing fox will almost certainly wind her, and if he finds her, makes his meal.

So that here the gamekeeper, if he can, steps in. He must prevent the fox from winding the scent of game, either by confusing him or by pushing him out of his path. His first task must be to find every partridge nest he can, and mark it down on his map. Next, he may remove the eggs as they are laid and substitute artificial eggs, to place the real eggs in an incubator and only return them to the sitting bird when they are at the point of hatching. This is the so-called Euston system, and it certainly minimises the length of time during which the eggs may be considered in danger, either from vermin or from weather. On the other hand, it does not abolish the risk of a fox finding the nest at the critical moment when the young birds are coming out, and for this reason many keepers prefer to avoid interfering with the partridge while she is laying, and try to drown her scent with some kind of stinking mixture scattered near the nest—Renardine or one of the other compounds sold for the purpose. That very practical writer Arthur Hipgrave, in his excellent little manual The Management of a Partridge Beat, advises sprinkling the surrounding herbage with a mixture of Condy’s fluid and paraffin oil. He tells us that on a beat of which he was in charge he had a footpath four hundred yards long used by the public and their dogs, and that on Sunday mornings he used to go along with his mixture, and in one year, 1914, he had over two hundred partridge eggs hatched from nests near the path. He cannot remember the loss from foxes of a nest so treated.

There are other preventive measures. Some keepers believe strongly in old iron, either disused traps or ordinary chain, which if frequently handled will be avoided by foxes. Another ingenious method is the use of string to scare foxes from following the line of a hedgerow or bank. The keeper cuts a ball of tarred string into lengths of five or six yards, ties or pegs one end to the hedge or bank, about a foot from the ground, and fastens the other end to a stick firmly planted in the crop in the field. The fox beginning to travel down the hedge runs into one of these unexpected strings, gets scared, and moves away from the hedge.

So much for the earlier days of the season, with the sitting birds. There is another contingency to be dealt with, and that is the vixen with cubs in her earth, for whom she forages when she has finished suckling them. Here the keeper’s mainstay is rabbits. If there are plenty of rabbits on the estate, he is saved some trouble; if not, he must see that she, or the dog fox foraging for her, is supplied with them, or with some substitute for them—rooks, moorhens, rats. The fox gets to know the place and time of the supplied food, and comes punctually for the meal.

Earthstopping, a science in itself, is treated elsewhere in this volume. Needless to say, there is no man who can help, or can stop earths himself, more efficiently than the gamekeeper. And he will assist, if he is a wise man, in any way he can; for he, after all, has the same object in view as the Master of Hounds; he does not want foxes to get to ground, he wants them killed. There will always be keepers and keepers, just as there are countries and countries, and though no keeper can be expected to admit that foxes are beneficial either to partridges or pheasants, the philosophical Englishman will survey life round him as a whole, rather than his own lot apart from others. A gamekeeper who is a friend to the Hunt makes friends in the Hunt, and he does not lose by that. And he, like his employer, will recognise that just as there are parts of England where foxes are not preserved, there are also counties where fox-hunting is not only a sport but the making of industry, and that in a hunting country game birds must come second.