neW roles for naTure^125as they were to game preservation per se. Recreational shooting included
both the targeting of rare species so that they could be stuffed and displayed,
and the casual slaughter of birds for idle amusement. In 1835 Charles
Waterton described how, on the Yorkshire canals, ‘not a water-man steers
his boat along them but who has a gun ready to procure the Kingfisher’,
adding: ‘If I may judge by the disappearance of the Kite, the raven, and the
Buzzard from this part of the country I should say that the day is at no great
distance when the Kingfisher will be seen no more in this neighbourhood,
where once it was so plentiful’.^63
In areas where game shooting was important systematic attempts were
made to eradicate foxes. But elsewhere they were carefully preserved as a
quarry. Until the end of the seventeenth century, fox hunting was largely
a matter of pest control. Members of the aristocracy and gentry did hunt
foxes recreationally, but usually by surrounding the animal within the earth
and setting dogs upon it. The classic form of the ‘sport’, involving a long
chase across country, is usually said to have developed in the Midlands,
and especially in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and Rutland, counties
which always held pride of place in the geography of hunting.^64 Organized
fox-hunting required, it is said, a countryside divided up into large blocks
of property rather than one characterized by a multiplicity of intermingled
figure 24 The progressive elimination of the pine marten (top) and polecat
(below) from England in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The effective disappearance of both species was largely, although not entirely, the
consequence of persecution by gamekeepers (after Langley and Yalden 1977).