Part 31

The best sizes of shot for duck are probably No. 7 or 8 if reliance is to be placed upon hitting head or neck, or No. 4 if it is desired that body shots should kill. Probably No. 6 is the very worst size to use, because it has power enough to get through the breast feathers but not through the breast bone of a duck at a moderate range. No. 8 does not appear to the writer to do much damage to a coming duck unless it catches him in the head and neck, and then it is fatal, and that is all that can be said of No. 6, which has so much less chance of hitting the vitals. There is a very well developed horror of plastering, and that is the reason why No. 4 is very popular for wild duck. A choke bore and No. 4 shot are a good combination for this sport.

FLAPPER SHOOTING

Flapper shooting is killing wild duck before they have got their full powers of flight. Its sport consists in getting shots. Very good spaniels are wanted to make the flappers rise at all. They are very easy to kill, and even teal flushed before the sportsman are about as easy as a sitting mark. Indeed, to some people they are more easy, because a sitting mark is very often missed not only by pigeon shooters but also by platers of guns.

ENCOURAGING THE FOWL

It seems curious that wild fowl that spend most of their time in the water particularly dislike wind, but so it is, and in making teal pits or improving them, or in attracting fowl to a river, the more artificial shelter you can afford the fowl the more they will be attracted to your water. Near the coast this is generally well understood, and there, too, the roughness of the sea greatly influences the birds to seek peace and shelter inland; so that there are naturally good days and bad ones for shooting from the “gazes.” In a smooth sea and fine weather duck seem to prefer to go to bed, which they do in the daytime, on the sea. But in rough weather the majority will find out any quiet places on fresh water where the presence of other duck prove to them that there is safety. For this reason some half-tame wild duck are a great attraction to the really wild ones, but the former can be only kept at home by good feeding, for wing-clipped fowl are _no_ attraction to the really wild birds. Home-bred birds appear not so much to attract as to go and fetch the wild ones, and this is the reason that wing-clipped birds will not do. On the “gaze” system 800 duck have been killed in four days’ shooting by a party. Mr. John Mills, of Bisterne, using an 8 and a 12 bore, has killed 130 fowl in a day from one “gaze,” and on one occasion 100 cartridges were shot away from one “gaze” in a few minutes, and the shooter ran out of cartridges and had to stop and look at the fowl for half an hour. He killed 60 duck, and thought he could have doubled his bag with another 100 cartridges. This was at Lord Manners’ place, Avon Tyrrell. In parts of Dorsetshire as well as Pembrokeshire a great deal of attention has been given to the formation of teal pits and the cultivation of wild wild-fowl, but the biggest bags made have fallen far short of those mentioned above, possibly because the fowl are generally taken in an ordinary day’s shooting of other game, and not in specially arranged big days.

RABBIT SHOOTING

From potting the unsuspecting rabbit sitting at his front door, and spoiling two blades of grass for every one he eats, to killing rabbits hunted out of heather by spaniels, there is nearly as wide a difference as the whole range of the shot gun embraces. The rabbit is said to be the schoolboy’s game, but the schoolboy might fairly retort that this is because the seniors cannot hit him. He is certainly the easiest and also the hardest to kill of all the British food for powder. It just depends upon how he is treated whether he is worthy to be called a sporting beast or not. A rabbit in strange ground, or one that knows he cannot get home, is the poorest-hearted little beast possible, and is even too much afraid to run away. Then we are often told what splendid sport rabbits make for the gun when hunted by beagles. This is a fraud. It sounds pretty, but in practice all the rabbits but one will be sitting up trimming their whiskers with their fore feet and listening to the direction of the hunt, for the beagles’ pack, and so only one rabbit is being hunted at any one time. If you are watching a rabbit and hear the hunt turn, you will get ready for the time the creature runs. But he will not run; he will merely hop quietly out of the line of the hunt, and sit up to listen some more.

In bracken that is not too thick the rabbit may bolt, but when it is very thick the author has watched rabbits defeat a whole team of spaniels by the higher strategic operation of sitting quite still. In this stuff you see them at your toes, much too near to shoot, and cannot see them at all when they are far enough away for half a load of shot not to smash them. If you want pretty rabbit shooting, you must have dogs that do not “open,” or else beaters. In fair undergrowth, in which one can just see to shoot sometimes, rabbits when at home will make for their holes fast enough, and they take shooting. But for difficulty in covert they are as nothing compared with rabbits that have well used runs through fairly long heather. Sometimes in running they will be under the heather, and even under the level of the ground in the broken surface; sometimes they will be above the heather. You will probably try to shoot a little in front of them as they turn and twist along their runs at great speed, but nothing makes a shooter feel so foolish as shooting so much in front that the quarry never at any time gets as forward as the shot went. The heather rabbit is quite capable of creating this feeling, for when you lose sight of him he frequently changes his course just as if he knew that his enemy was noted for shooting well in front. Where under covert is very thick indeed, the author has never seen pretty rabbit shooting, although he has seen fearless spaniels trying to make the rabbits run, and succeeding in making them crawl and hop by turns, but run very rarely indeed. They seem to know that the spaniels cannot catch them in such places. Rabbit shooting on a grand scale is nearly always a failure. You kill the numbers, no doubt; but in order that you should do it the rodents have been ferreted or “stunk” out of their holes, and the latter have been stopped up, and most of the quarry appear to know they are in a trap, and are philosophical enough to think that it is useless to run without having a place to run to. You can certainly drive rabbits past the guns, but you cannot always make them run. In only fairly thick under covert, with rides for the guns to stand, fair sport is often obtained. You may see the rabbits come up to the ride and then stop and hide. They fear to cross. Then, when they are obliged to go, they make a rush of it; evidently they know their danger, and think safety lies in speed. If they can be got to cross like this, there is sport in it, provided the rides are not too wide. If they are wide, you make a certainty of your shot, and the sport is less. The best sporting width is that which causes an uncertainty as to whether the shot succeeded, and an examination in the bushes to see whether the shot was well or ill timed. That is to say, the best sport is when the bushes take up a lot of the pellets and the rabbit is out of sight before the snap shot is off.

Gas tar is as good as anything to keep rabbits out of their holes. It is not bad when properly employed to get them out. But as strong-smelling stuffs are generally used, they keep the rabbits in their holes for one, two, or three nights, until hunger compels an exit past the paper dipped in tar. It is a good plan to put the paper down the holes only on the windward side of the burrows; this has the effect of blowing the smell through the whole of the compartments, but leaves open bolt holes where nothing will impede. The next day the other side of the burrow can be doctored, and this will prevent re-entry. After this, shooting may take place without many uninjured rabbits going to ground, but the wounded will go in and die there; consequently, there is nothing like stopping out if the rabbits can be got out. A very effective plan for this is the use of a line ferret. It is best not to let the ferret try and bolt the rabbits; that takes too much time. But if it is run through the holes one day and tar-paper is inserted the next, most of the rabbits will be found to have had pressing business elsewhere. Consequently, they can be shot, and give better sport than if they had been subjected to back-scratching by the ferret’s poison claws. But probably the best way of all, where the holes are not amongst rocks, is to fill up all entrances with a clod of soil or turf and sprinkle the latter with gas tar or spirits of tar. Twenty-four hours later the process has to be repeated, for the rabbits will have scratched out. This should be repeated every day until the shoot occurs, but only the first stopping will be much trouble; there will be few holes to stop afterwards. In trying to make a big bag it is very necessary to put down netting to keep the rabbits off the beaten ground. Stops will do, but are not as effective as the net.

The preservation of rabbits implies, of course, the destruction of vermin, especially cats. The next necessity is fresh blood in January or February, and early and close shooting or trapping. Rabbits degenerate quicker than most animals, and in-breeding and stale ground are the worst causes. On some soils lime-dressing seems to be absolutely necessary for the continued health and reproductive powers of rabbits in warrens. Out of warrens, and especially where they are not wanted, nothing seems to injure them. Neither disease, vermin, nor the schoolboy’s gun will do them any damage where they are not encouraged. This is probably because they are most healthy where they are most scarce, and it is only nature’s justice that if they poison the grass they should poison themselves also.

Shooting rabbits over ferrets requires much more attention than it is worth. The rabbit always seems to bolt well when the shooter is not attending; when he is all expectation, the rabbit comes and looks at him, pokes his head out of the hole, where to shoot him would be to destroy his value. Then, just as the ferret must be getting up to the quarry’s tail to make him bolt, the head disappears and is seen no more. Then in ten minutes or half an hour the experienced person says it will be necessary to dig, because the ferret is lying up, or if he is muzzled he is probably pounded, with rabbits’ backs to scratch on all sides of him, but no rabbits to bolt. Then, when the most unexpected event does take place, and the rabbits do bolt well, those you wound are sure to go to ground with a broken leg or shoulder, and so stop proceedings, either by detaining the ferret or by informing their fellows. Ferreting is not nearly as good sport as shooting stopped-out rabbits. When beaters for the latter are used, they should make no noise. The object is not that the quarry should quietly canter along in front of a line of guns, but you will want them to lie well, so that when disturbed in close contact with some beater’s stick they may run well. The former they will do if there is fair covert to lie in and no noise, not even “tapping” of sticks. The latter they will do if they are poked up with a stick instead of being thrashed up with a stake. The biggest record of rabbit shooting is that of 5096 rabbits to nine guns in the day. This was in 1885, in Mr. J. Lloyd Price’s Rhiwlas warren. The load of shot best for shooting warren rabbits, or any others if other game is not to be bagged, is ¾ oz. of No. 3 shot. This saves plastering, and enables both near shots and long ones to be taken. It was the load used with Schultze powder when the bag above mentioned was made. Perhaps it is not correct to talk of a bag of rabbits when such wilful slaughter occurs. There must have been between seven and eight tons of rabbits for that one day’s work.

If rabbits come out from a covert to feed in a rough banky grass field, one that will afford good sport if the rabbits lie out in it, this can be brought about by means of wire netting, the lower part of which is set so as to fall by the pulling of a string. However, half the fun is lost when rabbits are shot out of woods. This plan for keeping the beasts out of their coverts is perhaps more useful in snow when the trees are in danger, and when, too, the rabbits highly appreciate the hay in the sheep racks. Indeed, feeding with £5 worth of hay would often save £500 worth of young trees.

The enclosing of warrens with wire netting is a simple matter, and the principle should be that rabbits can get in but cannot get out. This is easy enough to arrange. There must be turned-in wire at both the top and bottom, and turned-out wire at the bottom. This rests on the ground, and there is no need to put it underneath. About 6 inches of turning-in is enough. Three feet 6 inches is about the best height for wire, although if the ground is quite flat probably 3 feet and an over-lap of 6 inches to prevent climbing from the inside is enough. Then if, on the outside in several places, a wall of turf is built as high as the fencing, and a single turf is laid as a lead on to the overlay of netting, rabbits will enter freely, but will not get out again. It is thought best to use graduated wire, very small at the ground in order to keep in the young ones, but it may be that the warrener will wish the young ones to fare the best, and in that case, if the crops outside permit, it may be a help to the young rabbits to let them escape through netting that keeps in the old ones. They will all come in again some time by means of the external turf walls, and then, having grown big, will have to remain.

HARES

To the insular Britisher there are only two sorts of hares, the brown and the blue. Possibly they cross breed, but naturalists are mostly opposed to this view. However, if they do not cross, the writer has seen specimens in Caithness which he could not assign to either race. Nowhere else in Scotland does there seem to be much ground inhabited by both species.

The blue hare is not only a creature of the moors, but of the top moors. The brown hare never goes up there by any chance but he often occupies moors of low level bordering the cultivation. In Caithness the highest tops are usually not very high, and the blue hares are often found on the moor only a few feet above sea-level. Consequently there are opportunities for cross breeding which in the other counties rarely exist.

Hares are said to be very prolific, but as a matter of fact they increase only very slowly: what they might do in more favourable circumstances is another matter. One writer affirms that when a brace was confined in a walled garden there were 57 hares counted at the end of one year. That is possibly correct, and yet the hare does not breed well in confinement, which is the reason that parks are more often devoted to deer and sheep than to hares, even when they are nominally hare parks. The late Lord Powerscourt introduced brown hares into his park in Ireland, where they did not increase; and the late Mr. Assheton-Smith, of Vaynol Park, introduced the blue Alpine hare there. In Ireland the latter is indigenous, but does not in winter change to white, with tips of black upon its ears, as it does in Scotland and upon the Continent.

_Country Life_ has lately reproduced a photograph of a family of six brown leverets, and it is evidently wrong to affirm that from two to five is the limit of numbers produced, as was done in _Country Life’s_ Shooting Book. Seven is the greatest number reported, but this requires confirmation. What has given the impression that two or three are the usual numbers produced is the fact that the hare does not seem to confine herself to one nest. All her eggs are not put in one basket, and this is instinctive wisdom; for little leverets give out a good deal of scent even when quite young, and are easily found by foxes and dogs. Cats are not fond of ranging the open fields, but prefer hedgerow and covert, so that they are more dangerous to young rabbits than to leverets, which are generally placed in the open fields without any sort of nest or other protection than the great space about them.

Very large bags of hares have frequently been killed. Lord Mansfield’s Perthshire bag of blue hares once reached very nearly 1300 in the day to five guns, and over 1000 brown hares are said to have been killed in the day quite recently. That the author has not verified, but formerly they must have been nearly as plentiful in Suffolk and Norfolk as they are now in parts of Bohemia and Hungary. Count Karolyi, for some years Hungarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James, once attempted to make a record: he killed to his own gun 600 hares in five hours’ shooting. It is not this unique feat for which Hungary is most noted, but for its constant supply over a large number of days. There they do not usually kill hares during partridge shooting, but delay the big drives until November. Nevertheless, at Tot-Megyr, six days’ shooting by nine guns produced 7500 hares and 2500 partridges. Probably Mindszent, in the south of Hungary, holds the record for a day at hares, for 3000 were killed there by Count Alexander Pallavicini’s ten guns.

Big bags of hares are no new thing in that country, for as long ago as 1753 over 18,000 hares were killed with equal proportions of partridges in 20 days’ shooting by 23 guns, including the Emperor of Austria and the Princess Charlotte. In Suffolk, in 1806, a complaint of the number of hares left on one estate was followed in the early spring by the killing of 6012. Whether this slaughter satisfied the farmers or no is not stated. Probably the biggest shoots of hares occur in the United States, where the animals, almost precisely like our own brown hares, are called “jack rabbits.” They have become so troublesome to farmers that the latter turn out in regular armies when the “trouble” becomes worse than usual, and the “jack rabbits” are done to death in countless numbers. Another kind of hare found in the States is the “cotton tail,” which in all outward appearance is precisely like our common rabbit, except that it does not burrow. It is the perquisite of the nigger dog, and if he is there, of the nigger dog’s master.

The “jack rabbits” give splendid coursing and a fine scent for hounds; the “cotton tails” do neither, but gun-dogs invariably point them. The hunting of the hare is probably the oldest of all sports now practised. It was rated high by Xenophon more than three centuries before the Christian era, and Xenophon would have made an excellent master of harriers in our day if we could have induced him to leave his nets at home. The fox never took precedence of the hare until earth-stopping was invented, and without it the former would even now be the less worthy as a quarry.

The brown hare prefers the open country to the woods, and is never found in the latter until haytime and harvest have driven it out of the fields. Even then it may take to a fallow field in preference to the woods, and the author has known a little 10 acre field to have more than 100 hares in it upon such an occasion. In wet dripping weather—that is, when the drip falls from the trees in covert along with the falling leaf—hares prefer to make forms in the open fields. These they will return to daily for weeks together, unless they are disturbed. But if they are put off their forms they do not often come back to them again, but make new ones. Consequently, if it is desired to have a great day’s covert shooting, including hares, the open country should be beaten for them several days before. The fact that they are disturbed will send them into the coverts. On the other hand, after the coverts are beaten, not a hare will be found in them for some time, whereas all the pheasants that are left alive will be back to roost the next day at latest, unless they have been driven to coverts that they know and like equally well.

People affect to despise shooting hares, and when they are driven out of coverts into the open they are of course rather more easy than pheasants fluttering up at a corner; but in high undergrowth, in covert or out, they are much more often missed than pheasants. In standing barley they are very difficult, and if turnips are really high they are not easy there. But the author has rarely seen clever hare shooting when the beasts have been driven up to fences in the low country, and up to the hilltops in Scotland. It is true that if only one or two hares come together, it is simplicity itself to handle them, but suppose four hares are each seen 20 yards apart coming up to your stand. If you can kill the four, you understand woodcraft as well as shooting. If you do not know the former, you will get one or at most two hares and frighten the others away. Your object will be to get all the hares nearly together before you take the farthest off one, then the next farthest off, and you will have two very much scared hares starting probably from your very feet for your second gun. The shooting then becomes extremely difficult, because it has to be very smart indeed. Sometimes, instead of four you may have twenty hares all within 80 yards, and it has been known that by shooting at the first within range all the rest have escaped without a shot. It is the habit of blue hares to follow each other up the runs through the heather or over the moss and stones; when one stops, the others seeing him stop too. Consequently, the way to get them together is only to stop the first hare when he has approached near and is also out of sight of the others behind, which any little unevenness of the ground accomplishes. A sharp “click,” which was most easily accomplished by cocking a gun in the days before the hammerless, is enough. One stone rapped once only on another will do it. But the hare must not see that, or any other movement, or he will be off at once. If he has not the advantage of the wind, and so cannot get the scent of the guns, a hare would run between a shooter’s legs without seeing him if he stood absolutely still and bestrode the hare track. But it is the “absolute” that makes all the difference. Some people say that a hare cannot see straight in front of it, but this is a mistake; it can detect the smallest movement although directly in front, and if it will almost run against you, it will not allow you to walk from the direct front up to it as it lies in its form.

When hares are wild, they sit high in their forms, and can be seen from a long distance. However, when they mean to lie close, they are remarkably difficult to see even upon open ground, except to those who know what to look for, and the most experienced will often pass them. Private coursers, especially when mounted, get extremely clever at finding hares in their seats. In beating for them, when they are not wild, the drivers who take a straight course will miss three-parts of the hares, but if they zigzag, making half-turns suddenly, every hare will believe itself seen and will run.