Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/232

174 ancestors of ours built up a race with iron muscle, inured to hardship, and, so far as venery was concerned, with brains superior to the creatures they hunted. Strong and active, keen-witted and cunning they were bound to be; when these qualities were dull they starved or were slain by the more powerful beasts.

The true sportsman is a good shot, if shooting be his hobby; he hates to wound and not kill clean. Often the drive has little fascination for him; he likes to tramp the turnips or the covert; he enjoys watching the well-trained dog, and insists that birds should be retrieved so soon as shot. Indeed, he will fire his second barrel to stop a cripple rather than leave a wounded runner to secure another head. Not infrequently he is more or less of a naturalist, watching the birds and other animals which are not included in the game-list. Sometimes he permanently exchanges gun for field-glass; some of our best ornithologists have been keen sportsmen, and still enjoy a shoot.

Unfortunately there exists another class; some of its members are town-bred men who have no real love of the country; they rent an estate and shoot over it at the proper time because it is the proper thing to do. They care nothing about their victims, but they like to make a bag that they can boast about; these are the men who are most ruthless in destruction of their rivals, the predatory birds and mammals. Bosworth Smith, pleading for the birds of prey, especially the persecuted raven, said that "as a rule it was not the great land-owner who was so much to blame, except in the matter of that culpable laissez-faire which led him to put a gun into the hand of his keeper without instructing him as to what he might and what he might not kill with it. The British landowner was, as a rule, pleased to see a rare bird in his grounds; if he possessed a heronry it was the crowning