"Tell me," he said, "who wrote: `Nature red in tooth and claw'?" And, of course, immediately gave the answer. He'd been, looking it up. "Tennyson," he exclaimed. In his poem In Memoriam. Anyway, to the point. And he went on to say that outside his house in the past ten days or so he had found two savaged corpses: a pigeon and a young rabbit. What creature could have been responsible?
In the first case, the pigeon, the bird had been found lying on its back, with all its breast flesh ripped away. "You know," he said, "how supermarkets now sell not pigeons plucked and ready for the oven, but just the whole breast. Well, all that had gone, and a bit more. it was cold. No idea how long the bird might have been lying there. "The right thing with carcases like this is to leave them for other predators to demolish. This was too near the house and it was buried.
There is a resident pair of sparrowhawks, "one of which now and then sails past the bird table and leaves a puff of feathers as it makes off with a blue tit or some other feeder. Would a pigeon be too heavy for a sparrow hawk to take to its usual feasting place or nest?" The second incident must have occurred just a minute or two before he went out of doors. Near the same place lay a dead young rabbit. Say about two thirds grown. The back of its neck had been ripped open from the base of the head down about two inches. You could see the bone clearly. The body was warm.
"it was sunny," he said. But that wouldn't quite account for its warmth, for he turned it over, and the underneath was also warm, as if it had been alive shortly before he came across it. The eye on the upward side has been picked out. He says he studied a book Animal Tracks and Signs in the Collins Guide series. It's by two Danes (though this is in English) and while they have some recondite information about things like elk droppings, they give much useful information. There is a gruesome photo of a hare killed by crows, with hindquarters partially eaten, and the eye taken out.
He's still studying it, and says it is full of illustrations showing, for example, the tracks of animals: hedgehog, hare, badger, otter, etc.