Page:Bird Haunts and Nature Memories - Thomas Coward (Warne, 1922).pdf/234

176 scarce it flourishes abundantly, as witness the rabbit in Australia; if circumstances are against it nothing but artificial aid can save it. A bird like the pheasant, supposed to have been originally introduced, can exist to-day without artificial aid, but only because we have so reduced the predatory species that it has but few dangers; yet where it is truly wild it is never numerous. Hand-reared birds would have very little chance in an unpreserved district, even were coverts allowed to remain.

Woods and pheasant coverts, provided for the accommodation of the sainted bird, are important factors in the domestic economy of many other species; they even supply refuge for the very vermin under the preserver's ban. Most of these woodland inhabitants are tolerated rather than encouraged, for they do no harm to game; but the keeper is their unconscious guardian, their enemies are his also. The unreasoning keeper spends his master's time and money in protecting his worst enemy, the brown rat. A large proportion of the massacred vermin subsist upon small birds and mammals; kites, kestrels, owls, hobbies, buzzards, and others are exceptional robbers of game, but they are regular and successful hunters of rats and mice. In the pellets of the barn or tawny owl are a few skulls of robins, tits, and finches, but far more of the troublesome house-sparrow, and the quantity of murine remains is amazing. Even those species which are game robbers whenever they have the chance—merlin, eagle, peregrine, sparrowhawk, raven, and crow—kill far more birds and mammals in which the keeper has no interest than his own special pets. Thus, the destruction of predatory species undoubtedly helps the increase of the kinds preyed upon, but as species depends upon species in both animal and vegetable world, any interference with the normal numbers causes a dislocation which is beyond all calculation. The increase of one harmless