One evening we were passing through a large, old-fashioned wood, when
we came upon a keeper feeding his pheasants--many hundreds of them:
and the talk went round to the question of sparrow-hawks and game. We
suggested that it was a wise keeper who spared the sparrow-hawk--that
this hawk did not kill game for a tithe of its food--and that the
time only came to kill it after it had been proved to attack game as
a habit. But the keeper would not hear of this; and he thanked his
stars, he said, that not a sparrow-hawk remained alive in his woods.
Just as he said these words we chanced to see before us on the ride,
in the middle of the long rank of pheasant coops, a dead blackbird.
The feathers lay scattered about the bird in a circle; there was every
sign of a sparrow-hawk's work. We called the keeper's attention to that
blackbird's body. He agreed that a hawk had killed it, and then we drew
from him the confession that he had not lost a single pheasant from a
sparrow- or any other hawk. The keeper told us a story of how a brood
of sparrow-hawks had been reared in a tree at the back of the very hut
in which the pheasants' food was mixed. Though the hut was also a sort
of watch-tower, yet the man who spent his days thereabouts had failed
to notice the hawks until the young birds left the nest. This is not to
say that the powerful old hen sparrow-hawk did not raid the pheasants;
but it is certain that she outwitted the under-keeper who worked daily
at the hut, and it proves that an under-keeper may not know all that is
to be known about sparrow-hawks and their ways.
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