Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Back when keepers didn’t stand for cats
From poaching gangs to the Victorian craze for feathers of every type, birds are now prey to a very modern issue, says David Whitby
Early gamekeepers in the late 18th and 19th centuries were employed to harvest creatures for wealthy landowners. This was not only to provide fine fare for the family, but doubtless for the army of servants employed in running such establishments. Not that the chambermaids would be feasting on venison, more likely something else further down on the list of culinary delights and that list was endless. Anything edible was deemed harvestable, nothing was protected and any means of capture was legal.
Surplus was sold at market and landowners realised that the fur, feather and fin occupying their estates was valuable. These early gamekeepers had to be tough, they were not alone in realising the value of high protein on offer. People were hungry and poachers desperate, they faced severe punishment if caught. Keepers were not just harvesting, but preventing others from doing so.
During the 18th and 19th century poaching gangs were not uncommon and severe injury or death awaited the keepers who took them on. These were not the ‘subsistence’ poachers looking for a family meal in desperate times, they were outlaws looking for birds and animals for sale on the black market. Their existence brought about the use of mantraps and spring guns to deal with the perpetrators and it was not until the 1830s that both methods were banned.
If you look at some of the old paintings of dead quarry you will see that the list was far wider than it is today, simply because there was an abundance of so many different creatures. According to a book in my collection, Our Favourite Songbirds by Charles Dixon (1897), some 130,000 cock goldfinches were caught annually just outside Worthing; a trapper would expect to catch 500 in a morning’s work. Cock finches were sold as cagebirds, once extremely popular — almost every household would have a finch of some description. The hens were sold at market as food, again, just about anything edible was taken.
We compare today’s wildlife populations with baselines going back 30 or 40 years, but by then we had already drastically changed the
Millinery massacre
Right: population dynamics of so many species. This constant readjusting of comparison is called shifting baselines. We can only imagine what bird populations must have been like to even see 500 goldfinches in a morning, let alone catch them. Many of today’s creatures will be but a distant memory in another 40 years’ time — just as so many have disappeared since I was a boy.
Much as the removal of hundreds of thousands of finches sounds appalling, it was another trade that really had a devastating impact upon birds both at home and abroad. In Victorian times feathers became the height of fashion and sophistication, the millinery industry in particular had much to answer for. To give some idea of the scale of destruction administered to our own and foreign bird species, the following order was placed by just one London dealer:
“He also caught and sold finches and was paid two shillings for a good cat skin”
6,000 bird of paradise skins, 40,000 hummingbird skins and 360,000 skins of various Indian species.
Even in Victorian times this was an industry with an annual turnover in the millions of pounds and our native birds were also suffering severe persecution and were doubtless harvested by gamekeepers and anyone else able to do so. Herons, gulls, bitterns, kingfishers, egrets, owls, great crested grebes and many other species, including the magpie that along with others became so rare it was close to extinction in the UK. My grandfather was the son of a keeper in Norfolk and I well remember him telling me that they simply shot anything deemed unusual to be sold either for feathers or to a taxidermist.
He also caught and sold finches and was paid two shillings for a good cat skin, a veritable fortune in those days for a young keeper’s son. As more species became rare and close to extinction in both the UK and abroad, opposition to the trade grew. The formation of the ‘Plumage League’ was in 1885 by Reverend Morris and Lady Mount Temple. Later it was replaced with a plumage league established by Mrs Emily Williamson, becoming the RSPB in 1904. Initially they were ridiculed as the ‘antis’ of the day, but gained influential members and eventually put a stop to much of the trade.
Supposed guardians of our birds, the RSPB is the largest and wealthiest pressure group in Europe. How are our birds doing in its hands? Currently over 70 species are on the red list, in serious decline and at risk of being lost from our shores. Over a quarter of all our bird species are in danger of extinction, twice the number since 1996. This trend is but one shameful statistic that helps place Britain as the most nature-depleted country in the world. How can this be when the RSPB has enormous funds, manages over 200 reserves, employs 1,200 people, influences governments and has over a million members?
Like many of today’s gamekeepers and indeed shooting people, birds are a passion. I live and have worked on a beautiful estate that is home to many of those species unlucky enough to find themselves on that red list. Why are we failing so miserably?
Modern predators
There are three requirements for the survival of all living creatures: sustenance, habitat and protection from predation. Presumably we all agree that sustenance and habitat are essential, and that where most birds are concerned both continue to be depleted. The sticking point is predation, or to be more specific, over-predation, because if you are a prey species then you must expect a number of predators to come visiting. It is this issue that brings out the very worst in the RSPB.
For prey species to survive they must massively outnumber their predators and where song and ground nesting birds are concerned, the list of predators is enormous. No longer is the magpie under threat but the lack of control on them has resulted in population numbers that are having a devastating effect upon other species.
Then we have the 10 million cats wreaking havoc on birds, bats, reptiles, amphibians and some of our rare small mammals. Despite this the RSPB refuses to call for control. Stating that there is no “scientific evidence that cats are linked to bird population decline in the UK”.
Behaviour in Victorian Britain by the fashion industry and those supplying it, including the keepers, was appalling, but now the behaviour of cat owners and those failing to insist upon control is equally if not more so. Our birds are in desperate need of help. Modern farming and the concrete jungle are not easy to halt, the only easement we have is to lessen predation, starting with cats.