Part 32

In beating flat country for hares, very much the same order as in partridge driving in the open, and as in pheasant beating in covert, has to be adopted. Stops and flanks are a necessity, but in driving moorlands a very different system is adopted. The hares there will all make up hill, no matter which way the beaters walk, so that a continuous circuit round the hills, beginning at the lowest level and cork-screwing upwards, is the plan if there are not enough beaters to cover the slope at one operation. If there are, the beating is done as if it were the desire to drive the hares along the slope or face of the hill, but as they will all pass along the front face of the drivers and mount the hill either near or far on, the guns will take up hidden positions upon the tops. Any other system of driving blue hares has been found from experience to be more or less misdirected energy. These animals are not very much liked in the deer forests, because the deer understand the hares’ movements as well as if they talked to each other, and a startled hare usually means also a startled stag in the stalking season. But in grouse ground the hares should not be kept very low in Scotland. Nowhere are you very far away from a deer forest and eagles, and the latter are satisfied to leave the grouse alone if they can get blue hare in summer and white hare in winter. The Alpine hare is much easier for an eagle to catch than either grouse or ptarmigan.

As to brown hares, they can only be plentiful where the relations between landowner and tenant are of the very best. The latter can, if they like, kill hares all the year round. Good land, a liberal landlord, and yearly tenancies are the conditions under which hares can thrive. The author likes to see plenty of them as proofs that the tenants are not unsportsmanlike, and that the keepers are friendly with the farmers and enemies to the poachers. Opposites in both cases have not been quite unknown.

It has been said that hares can be “called up” by poachers. Perhaps that is so; the only cry of the hare the author has heard is that distress note that will often, on the contrary, drive away the other hares. If they will come to call, they must be in the habit of calling. It is the note of the doe hare that is supposed to be imitated. If she calls her young she has no cause to call the “jack”; she is found by him by the trail scent, and is worried far more by his attentions than she likes. It is not uncommon to see half a dozen “jacks” persecuting one doe hare, and continuing to do so for hours if not for days together. The “jack” seems to hunt the trail of the doe when it is hours old, and long after any harrier would notice it.

The esteem in which the hare was held in the Middle Ages is shown by a verse attached to an English translation of the Norman-French _Le Art de Venerie_, by William Twici, huntsman to King Edward II.:—

“To Venery y caste me fyrst to go, Of wheche iiij best is be, that is to say, The hare, the herte, the wulfhe, the wylde boor also; Of venery for sothe there be no moe.”

Who wrote the verse does not appear to be accurately known; evidently it was not Twici.

SNIPE

Snipe shooting is the fly fishing of the shot gun.

There are only three species of snipe that regularly visit England, and only one that breeds here. This is the full snipe. The great solitary or double snipe is rarely seen, and as a sporting bird, therefore, does not count. The jack snipe is far the most beautiful, and is met with some years in fair quantities, but is rarely found in greater proportion than one to five of the full snipe. The jack snipe is rarely missed by a deliberate marksman, but a snap shooter who is used to the quick and zigzag rise of the full snipe is often able to miss the little jacks, for their flight is almost that of a butterfly. Besides, the jack snipe has a very trying habit of pitching down suddenly as if it were badly wounded, when it becomes tempting to the shooter to go and pick it up with his gun at safety. Then the little creature is remarkably hard to move a second time, and thus suspicion becomes apparent certainty, so that when the shooter is about to give up all hope of finding the dead bird the quick one flies slowly away, unharmed by a hasty shot, or by the concentrated language which sometimes is mistakenly supposed to follow. The jack snipe is the comedian of the gunner’s quarry. This 2 oz. bird is not much of a mouthful for a big retriever, and the only reason it is not usually injured by even tender-mouthed dogs is probably because it and all the other species of the family are naturally offensive to the taste of the dog. They never would be retrieved from choice, and the duty has generally to be forced upon the young canine assistant of whatever breed it may be. Not many jack snipe come to us before October, but a few have been found in September, and in every month in the year, which has given rise to the speculation that they might have bred here, but that has never been proved to have occurred by the discovery of eggs. They are migrants from the North, frail creatures which surrender themselves to the wind, and apparently thereby avoid the wave. At any rate, large numbers of them do survive, although doubtless many in adverse winds miss the coasts and perish, like woodcocks, in the Atlantic Ocean. The course in the air taken by these birds is not well known. It has been affirmed that many woodcock arrive first on the north and west coast of Ireland, and most of the jack snipe on the south-east coast, and although we are inclined to regard instinct—and the migratory sense is an instinct—as an uncontrollable impulse which always acts in the same way, it appears to have results that are not to be thus accounted for, and the birds arrive in turn on all the coasts and by various routes.

The Wilson snipe in America is closely allied to our full snipe, although it ranks as a species. It is even more migratory than our own bird, some of which always breed in England, Ireland, and Scotland. But the Wilson snipe leaves the Northern States in the winter and makes its way to the lands warmed by the soft airs off the Gulf of Mexico. Snipe, then, in most of the States are only to be shot in the autumn and spring migrations. Probably the finest snipe shooting ever experienced in America, and only to be matched in India and Burmah, was that obtained by Mr. Pringle in Louisiana, an account of which he has published in book form.

The full snipe generally utters a sharp cry on taking wing, the jack is silent; but the breeding cry of the former differs materially from its note of fright, and at the same time that it utters the former it sometimes shoots downwards and makes another air vibration with its wings or tail. This has been said to be a vocal sound, but the author is quite sure this view would not be held by anyone who watched the bird through a field-glass. It may be seen to descend while making the noise which has given it the rustic name of “heather bleater,” and it does this with a closed bill; but upon occasion it opens its bill, and then the vocal sound, as well as the other, is distinctly heard.

The powers of flight of the full snipe vary with the time of year. The author once knew a grouse shooter of long experience and success who prided himself upon his skill as a snipe shot. When, however, he was for the first time in his life taken to a snipe bog in November, he never let off his gun. The birds, he said, were too wild to shoot; but others shot them, so that it may be said there are snipe and snipe. These birds seem to feed all day and all night too; at any rate they may be found upon their night feeding-grounds at all times of the day, and so fond are they of favoured places that they return to them constantly. Moreover, if one bird is killed on a favoured boring ground, another almost invariably takes his place in a few days if the weather remains the same. If it does not, every snipe in a neighbourhood may be gone in a night. Snipe are dependent upon food they find by boring in soft earth, so that frost compels them to change quarters. As a rule, wet weather disperses snipe all over the mountains and fields; they can then feed anywhere. Frost sends them into the bogs, and still harder frost to the springs, still harder again to the west coasts and to Ireland.

Two occasions have been recorded where snipe collected in hundreds upon dry arable fields, where apparently there was nothing for them to feed upon, and where they returned after a snipe drive had been instituted.

Many are the “certain” methods of getting on terms with these birds, but they are all to be taken with a grain of salt. Whether snipe will lie best when hunted for down or up wind, and whether they should be shot upon the rise or when their twisting is done, are questions to which different and emphatic answers are often given. However, we believe in each by turn and nothing long. The snipe is too changeable a creature to conform to any rule whatever. He is nearest consistency in rising against the wind, but even that depends upon the rate of the wind. When it is only blowing gently, the snipe can rise away from you as you walk down wind; but they cannot do so in heavy breeze, and consequently walking down wind gives the easiest shooting, and sometimes also enables a better approach to be made to the birds. On the other hand, if your feet are cracking up ice, you will probably not get near to the birds however you attempt to approach them, and they can hear you farthest off when you are beating down wind. In very wet bogs a dog will generally flush more snipe than he will point, but when they will lie to a dog, down wind is still the best way, for although your setter will sometimes flush by accident, he will point a great many that otherwise would not rise at all, and this little 4 oz. bird gives out a great scent, one that in favourable conditions enables a dog to find him at 50 and even 100 yards. A curious feature is that young dogs do not object to pointing the game, although they hate to mouth it. Indeed, it is only upon close approach to a dead snipe that a retriever first shows his abhorrence, just as if he were suddenly taken by surprise in his pleasurable anticipation of mouthing the game. In the _Snipe and Woodcock_ of the Fur and Feather Series, Mr. Shaw gives the 1376 snipe killed in the 1880–81 season as the best ever made in the British Islands, but this is nothing compared with Mr. Pringle’s work in Louisiana already referred to. His best season was that of 1874–75, when his own gun killed 6615 snipe. In twenty seasons there he killed to his own gun 69,087 snipe, and his best day, on 11th December 1877, gave a bag of 366 snipe. Britishers may be inclined to doubt whether the Wilson snipe gives the same difficult chances as our own full snipe, but their habits are identical, as also is their flight. Probably, therefore, it may best serve as a guide to shooters if instead of the author attempting to decide which method of beating is the best, he quotes Mr. Pringle’s words, for he surely is the champion snipe shot.

First, then, he preferred full choked hammerless guns by Purdey, and he used No. 9 shot, with sometimes No. 8 in the second barrel. Presumably these were American sizes. When the game was scarce, Mr. Pringle used a pointer or setter in the ordinary way, but when there were lots of snipe he only allowed the dog to point dead, and not to retrieve.

He found that there was great loss of shooting unless he himself walked to the fall of every dead bird, as others would be sure to rise near the spot and get away unshot at when this duty was done by deputy. Then this champion snipe shot preferred to beat down wind with a beater each side of him, but when he beat across the wind, as would be done if the ground was awkward for the other method, he had both beaters down wind of him, because of the habit snipe have of rising into the wind. By having the beaters a little behind him, as well as on the down-wind side, he thus got shots at birds they flushed, which would not have been the case had they been up wind of the gun. When the end of the beat was reached, time was saved by driving back, over the ground already beaten, to take another down-wind beat. The ground must have been particularly sound for good snipe bog. Walking up wind was sometimes necessary, and then the arrangement of the beaters, of which there were two, was the same as for the down-wind beat, but the wilder the snipe were the farther behind the gun the beaters’ line was formed.

Mr. Pringle only used one gun, had no loader, and explains that with a second weapon he could have killed many more birds. Probably most people will not be sorry that he did confine himself to one gun.

The best snipe bag made in England in a day does not at all compare with that from the New Orleans district just quoted. Mr. R. Fellowes is credited with 158 in a day, and Lord Leicester at Holkham, in 1860, with 156 to his own gun in the day. In County Sligo 959 birds were killed in the season 1877–78 by Mr. Edward Gethin; and Mr. Lloyd in 1820 wrote that he accounted for 1310 snipe, whereas Mr. Mottram in the Hebrides in 1884 killed 992 snipe to his own gun by the end of October. Sir R. Payne Gallwey tells us of an Irish bag of 212 birds in a day by one gun before the time of breech-loaders, but does not mention the shooter’s name.

The moon has been credited with a good deal of influence upon the behaviour of snipe; this is on the ground that they cannot feed in the dark. But what is dark to a night bird? Probably there is no such thing; certainly the fly-by-nights do not kill themselves by flying against trees, and more than that, the snipe never does feed by sight. He bores in the ground to feel for the worm; when he has felt its position, he brings out his bill and thrusts it in again in the right spot, and out comes the worm. Then he repeats the process. If these birds are not always hungry, they must stand guard over their favourite boring patches until they get so, for they rarely go away from them to rest upon foodless ground unless they are disturbed either by men, dogs, or weather.

Very few men ever excel in snipe shooting. The actual aiming at a snipe is the difficulty. He may be there when you aim, but is not there when the shot arrives. If you wait until he has done his zigzag flight, he is almost sure to be too far off. If you can shoot just above him, when his wing goes up for a twist, and at a distance of 40 or 45 yards, with No. 8 shot, you will probably kill him. That, however, is not very helpful advice, and the only thing that the author can say that is likely to be so is that the snipe becomes easy, by comparison, when he rises against the wind and shows his white breast to the gunner. The author has killed fourteen August snipe in as many consecutive shots, but he has done no such thing with November snipe on a crisp day, and it would therefore ill become him to say how it can be done, for the very good reason that he does not know.

The snipe is credited with great pace, but in shooting driven snipe it soon becomes evident that they do not require half as much allowance as a partridge. It is the twist that makes pretence that they are actually fast. They are particularly smart and quick, but distinctly not fast in the sense that a driven grouse down wind is speedy.

WOODCOCKS

Woodcock shooting over a team of spaniels is the fox-hunting of shooting, according to Colonel Peter Hawker.

It is generally stated that woodcocks are decreasing in numbers of late years, but this is possibly a mistake. At any rate, Lord Ardilaun has at Ashford made the biggest bag ever known in Ireland only eleven years ago—namely, 205 ’cock in the day; and in 1905 the record bag for Cornwall was accomplished, but this is far from being the record for England also. Still, there is no proof that because a big bag is made in one day that there are as many birds as formerly killed in any one season. Be this as it may, our method of covert shooting is now very much in favour of the woodcocks. Formerly, when they were the principal game of the coverts, the latter used to be beaten as often as it was believed there were woodcocks in them. Now this is by no means the case. Coverts are beaten once, twice, or thrice in a season, and times are fixed with no regard whatever to the woodcocks. If it is an open season, the inland woodcocks are likely enough to be there when the date for pheasant shooting comes; but if hard frost has set in the birds will have gone on to the west coasts of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, and possibly also many may have passed on into Spain. Then we say it is a bad season in England for woodcocks, but that is merely because we beat our coverts after the bird has flown. Still, possibly the best season for woodcocks in England is that which most favours the killing and also the preservation of the birds, if that is not paradoxical. When they are found all over the country in mild winters, they escape the guns for the most part, because their even distribution does not favour their being looked for of set purpose.

Comparatively few are killed in the pheasant coverts, even if many are seen. The guns are set in the line of flight of the pheasants, and whatever set purpose a migrant woodcock may have by night, his only purpose by day is to have no purpose at all. You can never trust him to go a hundred yards in any one direction, and for this reason he offers more chances to the beaters, who have no guns, than to the sportsmen who have them. On the contrary, when the frost comes early and drives the birds to those shores that know the Gulf Stream, then the woodcocks congregate in coverts, and are made the special objects of the sportsmen’s attentions. The longer the frosts and snows last the more ’cock are killed, and sometimes it happens that a stay is made to these exterminating proceedings by the abject poverty and weakness of the birds. This has occasionally been the case in Ireland, and the fact that these birds were caught by frost and snow on one side, and by the Atlantic on the other, shows that migration is not always salvation to the migrant. Just why the birds became so weak as not to be able to go forward to Spain or Africa, it is difficult to say. But possibly those that get starved in this way are the late arrivals that find themselves weakened by much flying when they first arrive on the Irish coast, and without food can go no farther. Probably those already there when the food begins to get scarce do go on.

Whether the woodcock are generally increasing or not, no doubt there are more home breeding ’cock than formerly. There is scarce a boggy birch wood in Scotland that has not its young woodcock in August, and obviously these birds are bred there. They are not then much good for the table, and if sportsmen would make a rule not to shoot them they would probably increase much faster than they do. Most of the foreign woodcocks come to us in October and November. Then they appear to settle to rest on the first land they see, but they are to be found there only for a few hours, and go on and distribute themselves over their favourite country very quickly. The sea walls and sea banks, especially when rough fringed with grass, are favourite places for these new arrivals, which in Lincolnshire are in good condition when they first come in, but are said to be poor and weak on arrival on the shores of Devon. In Ireland the first arrivals, and the majority, settle on the extreme north. Next in proportion, lighthouse information shows, they arrive by the west coast. The snipe also arrive mostly from the north, but the jack snipe come in largest numbers to the south-east coast of Ireland. This points to the conclusion that woodcock arrive mostly from Scotland, and it is suggested that those which breed farthest north first move south by stress of weather. It is also suggested that our home-bred woodcock do not remain in the winter, but move late in August or early in September. These contentions are evidently conflicting, and it is probable that the first is right, and that our home-bred birds remain where food and shelter is plentiful, and only move when they are not. The absence of home-bred birds in certain coverts in September has often been noted after they have been constantly observed in August, but this can often be accounted for by the springs running dry in the latter part of August, and available food being consequently scarce. The old birds are said to moult in September, and if this is correct it is a very good reason why they should be difficult to find then; and if this habit is invariable, it would be clear evidence against the home-breeding birds migrating in that month.

It appears that woodcock can be encouraged by planting in suitable places, and that this encouragement is not only to the migrants, but induces more birds to remain and breed here. The increase of the latter habit has been a startling and pleasing fact in natural history. Its originating cause is not known, but that an enormous increase has taken place is freely admitted. As the birds themselves have started this habit, it appears that it is only necessary to spare large numbers of these natives to still further increase the number of home-breeding ’cock.

But no way of distinguishing them when on the wing seems to be possible, although most useful work has been done by the Duke of Northumberland, at Alnwick, in placing a metal ring round a leg of all young woodcock found there. Amongst other things thus established is that the movements of birds seem to be governed by no law capable of definition. For instance, a bird bred at Alnwick has been shot in the Highlands of Scotland, whereas others have been shot in the extreme south of England, and another in Ireland. But the strangest part of the story is that most of them do not appear to have been shot at all. Perhaps in that fact may lie the explanation why the home breeding of woodcocks increases.

It has been said that coverts devoted to pheasants save the lives of many ’cock, but it is also said that these birds do not like coverts in which there are many pheasants. It is suggested that the pheasants eat all the food, such as insects and worms, to be found under the dead leaves. There appears to be very little in this contention. A woodcock in covert is generally a woodcock asleep and not feeding. When flushed he is as foolish as a daylight owl. But in hard weather, when he has been unable to get enough food by night, and is compelled to feed in the daytime also, and when you find him on the brook-side, he is no fool then, and can fly as quickly as a snipe, and is as much on the alert. The difference in manner proves that the woodcocks are very rarely feeding when flushed by the beaters. In Ireland and the west of Scotland the warm heather-clad hills hold the woodcock more than the coverts do, until the birds are driven by snow or hail to the woods. Rain and mist will afterwards drive the ’cock out of the coverts and back to the hills, but it is thought that at Ashford fewer go back to the heather on each occasion, so that the longer shooting is delayed in January the more birds there are in those coverts.

Woodcocks lay four eggs; they pair, probably have two broods each season, and they are in the habit of carrying the young birds out to the feeding-grounds. They hold them by various methods: sometimes they clasp them to the breast by the pressure of the bill, sometimes they clasp them between the legs or thigh. One woodcock has been seen to carry two young birds together, one by each of the methods described.