Predator control past

Beautiful it may be but an ermine is merely a stoat wearing white, and where they aren’t controlled, the game count suffers, says Henry Grass

- Henry Grass

We were having a vermin drive during the first week of April and a stoat ran across the ride. I shot it and it turned out to be cream coloured, not an albino, but one still in its winter ‘plumage’. While it is quite common to see an ermine in the northern parts of the country, it is something of a rarity here. In fact, any stoats are, for we only account for about 20 a year.

The same week, Michael Kemp mentioned the total head of vermin killed on a large estate in Hungary. He quoted a figure of 10,000, which seemed very large until you gave some thought to it and realised that there were many large estates in this country which once accounted for numbers equal to this. Though it was part of their duties to keep pest species down, many estates paid their keepers a bonus — or ‘vermin money’ as it was called — as an incentive to keep predators to a minimum.

They had to show the vermin to the headkeeper and this meant that an accurate count was kept of the numbers killed. On many estates in the old days, it was a common sight to see a keeper’s ‘gallows’ on which everything that came under the heading of vermin was hung for all to see.

Wind direction

These have vanished over the years and quite rightly so, for apart from making it easier to tell which direction the wind was coming from, they were unsightly and served no useful purpose. I don’t think keepers were judged to be any more competent by those who saw them. If you look at the records where totals of game and predators can be compared, you find that, very often, they travelled in parallel lines. By this I mean that when the bags of game were high, so were the totals of vermin.