, who has some
claim to priority of verdict, it is a curse, even as the rabbit in
Australia, the lemming in Norway, or the locust in Algeria. The tiller
of the soil, whose business brings him in open competition with the
natural appetites of such voracious birds, beasts, or insects, regards
his rivals from a standpoint which has no room for sentiment; and the
woodpigeons are to our farmers, particularly in the well-wooded
districts of the West Country, even as Carthage was to Cato the Censor,
something to be destroyed.

It is this attitude of the farmer which makes the woodpigeon
pre-eminently the bird of February. All through the shooting season just
ended, a high pigeon has proved an irresistible temptation to the guns,
whether cleaving the sky above the tree-tops, doubling behind a broad
elm, or suddenly swinging out of a gaunt fir. Yet it is in February,
when other shooting is at an end and the coverts no longer echo the
fusillade of the past four months, that the farmers, furious at the
sight of green root-crops grazed as close as by sheep and of young
clover dug up over every acre of their tilling, welcome the co-operation
of sportsmen glad to use up the balance of their cartridges in organised
pigeon battues. These gatherings have, during the past five years,
become an annual function in parts of Devonshire and the neighbouring
counties, and if the bag is somewhat small in proportion to the guns
engaged, a wholesome spirit of sport informs those who take part, and
there is a curiously utilitarian atmosphere about the proceedings.
Everyone seems conscious that, in place of the usual idle pleasure of
the covert-side or among the turnips, he is out for a purpose, not
merely killing birds that have been reared to make his holiday, but
actually helping the farmers in their fight against Nature. As,
moreover, recent scares of an epidemic not unlike diphtheria have
precluded the use of the birds for table purposes, the powder is burnt
with no thought of the pot.

The usual plan is to divide the guns in small parties and to post these
in neighbouring plantations or lining hedges overlooking these spinneys.
At a given signal the firing commences and is kept up for several hours,
a number of the marauders being killed and the rest so harried that many
of them must leave the neighbourhood, only to find a similar warm
welcome across the border. Some such concerted attack has of late years
been rendered necessary by the gre