In February the gamekeeper's thoughts and energies are turned mostly in
the way of vermin and trapping. And where vermin is really plentiful it
is a wonderful wild sport that he enjoys in tracking and trapping the
creatures of his black list. In the North the vermin bag is more mixed
than in the South, and in the olden days contained such a great variety
of creatures as to suggest that the keepers enjoyed better sport than
their masters. They were ruthless in their war on all that they held
to be enemies to game; how ruthless may be judged from the following
list of vermin, bagged in three years by a famous keeper on Glengarry,
Inverness-shire. It indicates the proportion of the different sorts of
animals classed as vermin found in the Highlands in the middle days of
the last century: 11 foxes, 198 wild cats, 246 martens, 106 polecats,
301 stoats and weasels, 67 badgers, 48 otters, 78 house cats going
wild, 27 white-tailed sea eagles, 15 golden eagles, 18 ospreys, 98 blue
hawks or peregrine falcons, 7 orange-legged falcons, 211 hobby hawks,
75 kites, 5 marsh harriers, 63 goshawks, 285 common buzzards, 371
rough-legged buzzards, 3 honey buzzards, 462 kestrels, 78 merlin hawks,
83 hen harriers, 6 gerfalcons, 9 ash-coloured or long blue-tailed
hawks, 1431 carrion crows, 475 ravens, 35 horned owls, 71 common fern
owls (nightjars), 3 golden owls, 8 magpies. A total of nearly 5000
head, giving an average of more than 1500 head a year, or about five
head a day. The list, strangely enough, does not contain a single jay,
rat, or hedgehog.
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