Gamekeeper

A gamekeeper is a person who looks after an area of countryside to make sure there is enough game_%28food%29 for hunting, and or fish for angling, and who actively manages areas of woodland, waterway, farmland etc for game birds/animals.

Typically, the gamekeeper is employed by a landowner, and often in the UK by a country estate, to prevent poaching on his lands, rear and release game birds, control predators, manage habitats to suit game, and monitor its health.

To some, the gamekeeper is viewed as an indiscriminate destroyer of wildlife, providing sport for "rich toffs" who "blast birds out of the sky". The RSPB, for example, have criticised the poisonin of birds of prey on shooting estates.[1]

In the UK many colleges now offer courses up to and including diploma level in gamekeeping. Today, there are some 5,000 full-time gamekeepers employed in the UK. In addition, there are many who spend their leisure time and money, rearing game and maintaining habitats on their own small shoots. There are several variations in gamekeeping:

Lowland keepers:- rearing pheasant and partridge and managing lowland habitats.
Moorland keepers:- mangaing moorland for grouse in upland areas.
Stalkers:- keepers who specialise in taking people to "stalk" deer species, mainly in the uplands.
Ghillies/River Keepers:- keepers who manage rivers for trout and salmon.

Gamekeepers in fiction

Alec Scudder in Maurice (novel) by E.M. Forster (also the film adaptation)
Mellors in Lady Chatterley's Lover
Rubeus Hagrid in Harry Potter series
Tom Redruth in Treasure Island

External links

Gamekeeping as a career - BASC

The actual descriptive text portion of the article above (and its Contents menu) are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License then in effect published by the Free Software Foundation. The text article uses material from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamekeeper (retrieval date: 2007-05-27) and is provided "as-is" and without warranty. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify only the actual descriptive text portion of the article above (and its Contents Box) under the GNU Free Documentation License. A copy of the license is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License. Any advertisements (or active links not embedded in the actual article) and the layout or selection thereof are excluded from such license.
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