(^124) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Estates vied with each other to maximize the amount of game which was
shot, the magazine called The Field, which first appeared in 1853, regularly
publishing the numbers bagged by individuals and parties. But large
concentrations of plump game birds were a magnet for poachers. The Black
Act of 1723 was followed by important pieces of anti-poaching legislation
in 1755, 1770, 1773, culminating in the Night Poaching Act of 1817. This
laid down a penalty of 7 years imprisonment to any person caught with
equipment which might be used for poaching in ‘any forest, chase, park,
wood, plantation, close or other open or enclosed ground’.^51 Unnatural
concentrations of game birds were also, more importantly in the present
context, a target for non-human predators, and as early as 1792 John Byng
described how hawks, nesting in quarries, were being destroyed because
of the threat they posed to game.^52 Gamekeepers waged a long and savage
war on a variety of birds: the crow, the jay, rook and various forms of gull,
which would take eggs and young game birds; and the peregrine falcon, the
sparrowhawk, the kestrel, the osprey, the hen harrier, buzzards and red kite,
together with various kinds of owl, which predated on adults.^53 The decline
of most of these species in the course of the nineteenth century, while in part
the result of habitat change, was mainly a consequence of improvements in
firearms technology and an increase in the intensity of game preservation.^54
No less than 17,000 gamekeepers were recorded in Britain in the census
of 1871.^55 Naturalists saw them as the principal enemies of wildlife, one
in 1876 describing how they ‘seize every opportunity of destroying almost
every wild bird, beast and reptile that is not game’.^56 The red kite, once
one of our commonest birds of prey, was extinct in England by the end of
the century. The hen harrier, still moderately common at the start of the
nineteenth century, had gone by its end.^57 The buzzard fared little better. It
was extinct in Kent as early as 1810, and in Norfolk by 1820; by 1865 it
was said to be ‘by no means common and nearly exterminated in the eastern
and midland counties’.^58 By the end of the century it was confined to Devon,
Cornwall, and the far north-west of England.^59
Gamekeepers also worked hard to control stoats, weasels, rats and foxes,
but it was their success against the pine marten, polecat and wildcat which
had the most serious consequences. The latter was still relatively common
in the north of England, and in the Welsh Marches, in 1800 but was last
recorded at Eslington in Northumberland in 1853.^60 In 1800 the pine
marten was present in every English county except Wiltshire. By 1850 it
had disappeared from much of Midland and southern England, and by the
early twentieth century survived only in the Lake District and possibly the
Cheviots.^61 The polecat was found in every county until 1850, in spite of
many centuries of hostility towards it. By the early twentieth century, it
survived only in parts of Cumberland and Yorkshire (Figure 24).^62
The chronology of this latter decline may reflect the arrival of the breach-
loading gun in 1851. Indeed, to some extent declines in wildlife in this period
were related as much to the character and wider availability of firearms,
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