Part 33

Probably no bird gives a more easy shot than a woodcock, and at the same time none is so often missed. The reason may be that shooters are inclined to shoot at twice the distance (at what they consider the “come-by-chance”) that they fire at the game bred on and by the estate. They are also frequently a little excited by the cry of ’cock, and besides this, the birds have a queer habit of twisting round any tree trunk or bush that happens to be near. These side darts are made with a good deal of pace, even by birds that have been flying like owls. They seem to be the outcome of sudden impulse; it would not be correct to call them sudden resolutions, because whatever they are due to they are liable to constant change. These twists are often at right angles to the previous flight. The birds seldom go far in one direction, but have often been known to take a flight of half a mile, with several of these right-angle turns in it, and to settle after all within a few yards of the place whence they were flushed.

The shooting of the woodcocks over setters or spaniels in the heather is extremely pretty work, but only a dog experienced on this kind of game is of much use. In covert the woodcock is rarely shot to spaniels, except in South Wales. The usual plan is a party of guns and beaters, and Lord Ardilaun hardly ever uses canine retrievers. The rocks make marking essential, and it is found that good markers are preferable to good dogs in ground so rough as to be difficult for the latter.

Bags of woodcock at Lord Ardilaun’s place have very frequently been misstated. Possibly the most “authoritative” mistake is in _The Snipe and Woodcock_, by Mr. L. H. de Visme Shaw, who says that in one day 508 ’cock were obtained at Ashford. That is not so. Lord Ardilaun very kindly informed the author that 205 ’cock was his best, but he explained that he was away from his game book at the time he wrote, and it is very likely, therefore, that Mr. R. J. Ussher is right in giving 209 ’cock as the record for one day there. The 205 ’cock were killed in January 1895, and at that time there were 508 ’cock killed in six days by seven guns. The big day was January 25th. Although not in a day, in a season, more ’cock have been killed at Muckross, near Killarney, than even at Ashford, or than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.

Several people besides the artist Chantrey have accidentally killed two woodcocks at a shot. Possibly it was never done by design.

Probably the best single day’s bag in England was that of 101 birds in Swanton Wood, on Lord Hastings’ Norfolk estate.

BLACK GAME

The season for these birds opens in the North on 20th August, and in the South on 1st September. They have been lately exterminated in the New Forest and in Norfolk, and have long since disappeared in most of the counties south-east of Staffordshire. In Salop and Wales there are a few of them, as there are also in Devonshire and Somersetshire and in all the northern counties. They are and always have been absent from Ireland, but are found throughout the Highlands and the border counties, and are far more numerous in Dumfriesshire and Selkirkshire than elsewhere. Probably the species is decreasing in numbers everywhere, except in isolated patches of country where they are especially preserved. They are found throughout North Europe and North Asia, but in the Caucasus there is a second and only other species, which is smaller, and in which the cocks are blacker, than in our species. A peculiarity of black game is that the cocks do not acquire the lyre tails until the third year, although the hens are said to be fertile in the second year. The white under the tail of the black cocks is flecked with black until the bird grows old, when the black gradually disappears. It is not at all uncommon to see beautiful word painting detailing the glories of the lyre tail, amongst other beauties, on 20th August, but this is not painting from nature, for neither old nor young birds have the lyre tail at that time. The old birds are then in full moult, and although they can fly as well as ever, they lie to dogs then as at no other time of the year, except in July and the earlier days of August. No one would wish these old stagers to be shot then, where they are numerous enough to afford driving later in the season. But where they are scarce, and that is nearly everywhere, they are liable to become more so by the inability of sportsmen to kill them at the only time of year they can be approached. The man who shoots them during the first seven days of grouse shooting breaks the law, but assists to save the race; for too many cocks there always are, and the majority of them are too old, and interfere with their younger relations in the breeding season. This cannot be avoided as long as sportsmen make a practice of killing the young birds over dogs during grouse shooting. Until after 1st September the birds of the year lie close and to their sorrow rise singly, so that one has but to find a brood and exterminate it. The old cock will not be with the chicks, and probably the grey hen will get shot; but she is more likely to escape than any of the young ones. Consequently, where the birds are not separately driven later in the season, the preservation and shooting of this fine game bird proceeds upon the principle of killing all the young ones and leaving all the old. That is exactly opposite to the principle adopted for all other game, and we cannot wonder that the race decreases in numbers. Another reason for the decrease is that moorlands are being more drained than they formerly were, and this destroys the rushes, upon the seeds of which young black game mostly live in their early period. They do not breed in the woods, but prefer to have their chicks on the lower moors, where they can find rushes, heather, and bracken. Whether they eat bracken in its early stages of growth, as pheasants have been known to do, the author is not aware, but upon the moorlands around St. Mary’s Loch, where there are no coverts, there used to be large numbers of black game, and in hunting the moors they were rarely to be found elsewhere than in the rushes and the ferns. Probably, therefore, ferns as well as rushes are useful in some way to them, although it may be because ferns are a great resort of flies. The way that every young bird has to be found separately, and each gives the dog a point (whereas the grouse in most counties rise in broods), makes the keepers treasure the black game for the dog-breaking facilities they offer. They teach dogs to believe that there is always another in the heather, until they are sure there is not. But black game offer very easy shots, and consequently sportsmen rather despise them in this early stage. Then, on a sudden, a total change comes over the young birds, as it were in a night, and they are transformed into birds as wary as wild geese, and sit up on the hillocks to watch for danger. After that they must be stalked, driven, or left alone.

Stalking black game with a rook rifle is nice sport—infinitely more difficult than stalking red deer. With the shot gun it is still harder, because of the necessity of a nearer approach. But difficult as it is, the author once knew of a most extraordinary stalk. Two guns, unknown to each other, both stalked from different directions the same black cock on his fir tree; both, by luck or judgment, got up to the game; each fired at the same instant, and when the game fell, each unaware that the other had shot, claimed the bird. If that sort of thing can be done, it cannot be very difficult. But probably it never happened before or since, and as a matter of fact it is difficult to stalk black game.

If these birds were really plentiful they would be the most valued of all our game birds for driving. Probably there is not a pin to choose between their pace and that of grouse when coming down wind. The author has watched them coming to the butts together for half a mile, and the only difference was that the black cock were two storeys higher than the grouse. That shows which would be most appreciated by sportsmen, who are never happy unless they are accomplishing the difficult. But they are too few to drive separately in most places, and do not drive well with grouse. It would have been no uncommon thing had those third-storey birds turned back in the air and gone off over the drivers’ heads while the silly grouse were facing the music of the butts and dying in clouds of smoke, for this reference is to black powder days. Your black game can think in the air, like the wild ducks, and they can also fly into a wind about as fast as with one, again imitating the marvellous and unexplained power of some wild fowl, especially the teal. Pheasants, partridges, and grouse are creatures of the wind more or less, and pretty difficult to turn when the wind has got them, but not so your black game; they smell danger from afar, often only suspect it, but as they are like wild ducks, not slaves but kings of the wind, they will act upon their suspicion, because it is nothing to them to beat up against a wind, and besides, they are careless how long they fly. You cannot drive wild ducks, nor pigeons, nor black game, if they suspect your purpose. But when things are well managed they give great sport. Usually they will not, like a grouse, almost knock your cap off by rushing past your butt too near to shoot. They will be well up and look to be going easy. There they deceive, for they will be coming quite as fast as grouse if it is down a moderate wind, and if up wind very much faster, so that the lead, or allowance, and swing required is far more likely to be under than over done.

The author has taken part in killing 40 brace of black cock in a day, with no more excuse than that it was good for the dogs; but the kind of shooting in which anyone may be proud of a good score is in driving. Then the shooters have every right to gratification, but the drivers have far more. Late in the season, when black game are fit to drive, they sit up in the fir trees to look out for the enemy. They are so still in the dark Scotch pines that you may not see a bird as you go to take up your stand, but possibly the quarry has been watching all the time, and has observed not only the shooters but the drivers. Then your black game will probably be able to get away by the flanks, or if not, like the wild ducks, they may remember that there is always room at the top. In other words, they have the habits of game birds in August and of wood pigeons and wild duck in October. They are only unsatisfactory because the young birds are too confiding to shoot, and the old ones too artful to get shot.

The Duke of Buccleuch has had great sport with black game on his Drumlanrig Castle estate, but his best years there were a long time ago; the birds have been gradually growing fewer ever since. His very best year was in 1861, when 1586 black game were killed. This total upon an estate of more than 150,000 acres, although the largest, is nevertheless very small when compared with grouse and partridge bags over estates of one-tenth the size. Apparently the black game do not lend themselves to great concentration of breeding birds, or if they do, their fertility does not seem to be very great. Besides, concentration for shooting is extremely difficult, as is proved by the biggest bag ever made in a day. At Sanquhar, in Dumfriesshire, the late Duke of Buccleuch, with the assistance of eight other guns, once killed 247 black game in the day, of which over 200 were black cocks. This is probably the record day’s bag for Scotland or anywhere else, but it is noteworthy that it is only about one-tenth the number of grouse that have been killed in a day, and we may fairly say that the art of preserving black game has to be discovered, as also has that of introducing the bird into country new to it, which is only saying the same thing in other words.

The author has shot black game on Dartmoor and in Caithness and in most of the intermediate counties where they exist. Everywhere he has noticed a too great number of black cocks in proportion to hens, and as polygamous birds they should be treated like pheasants in this respect. The other point most noticed is that not more than a quarter of the grey hens breed. There is reason for this, and if it could be discovered, probably black game might be reared in numbers equal to grouse. The author merely speculates when he says that the excess of cocks has something to do with the trouble, but probably a worse fault still is that the old birds of both sexes are not shot, and the young ones are. There is no greater mistake than to believe that driving is an automatic selection of the old birds for destruction. This is far from the case in grouse shooting in Scotland, although in Yorkshire it is different; but your old black cock and grey hen carry years of wisdom to the topmost branch of the Scotch pine, and from that vantage post meet human strategy with avian tactics—and live to fight another year.

It is a great pity that someone does not take up the black game question and study it thoroughly. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of bracken, pine, and rush ground in Scotland, England, and Wales that have no sporting value. They are too high for pheasants and partridges, and do not grow the right food for grouse. The result is that they are useless, but are nevertheless natural homes for black game, and are so much appreciated that bachelor black cocks will inhabit them for years, as also will a few old grey hens that do not breed, and the probability is that they keep off all the breeding birds.

The grey hen lays from six to ten eggs on the ground. They are of a yellowish shade spotted with darker colour of brown or orange-brown. The playing-grounds and manners of the birds in love and war are best described in Booth’s rough notes, and best illustrated in Millais’ game birds and shooting sketches. However, both seem to suggest that all the birds in the neighbourhood meet on one playing-ground. This is not so, and there are sometimes and probably always several simultaneous tournaments in very near proximity.

The black game has feathered legs but not feathered feet, as has erroneously been stated.

These birds have been successfully introduced, and have bred for some years, at Woburn Abbey. Capercailzie have also been added to the birds of England by means of their successful introduction in the woods of Woburn, by the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.

PIGEON SHOOTING

There are three kinds of pigeon shooting in this country: that from traps; that against the farmer’s great enemy the wood pigeon (_Columba palumbus_); and that of the wild blue rock pigeon (_Columba livia_) along the cliffs. The stock dove (_Columba ænas_) is found amongst the wood pigeons in small proportion to their numbers.

A few years ago the “trap shooting,” as it was called, was very fashionable, and probably it will be so again, when the shooting schools have sufficiently shown that they can teach anybody to hit targets sent overhead, and cannot do much for any form of shooting that depends for its accuracy and quickness upon balance and good walking powers. Not that pigeon shooting is much of a school for this class of shooting either, but it is shooting at birds going away from the gun and rising at a fair range. At 30 yards rise the majority of those who shoot pigeons fail to kill many more than half their birds with _two_ barrels. It is a very poor shot indeed who misses as great a proportion of shots at driven pheasants. Yet with this evidence constantly before the eyes of everybody who reads his sporting papers, it is very frequently asserted that driven game is much more difficult to kill than birds rising in front of the shooter. Besides this, the pigeon springs from the ground slowly compared with a partridge or a grouse or a snipe, and it does not cause the sportsman to walk after it. The author has on many occasions seen pigeons dropped within 3 yards of the trap constantly by a man in good form, but he never saw a full-feathered grouse, partridge, or snipe knocked over as near as that to its rise. The difficulty of shooting rising game is to shoot straight quick enough; that of shooting driven game is to wait long enough and shoot straight. For the first, there is an individual limit for each of us, which no amount of practice seems to improve. There is, for the second, no limit to the cultivation of patience.

But this only applies to the single shot of each kind. The difficulty of driving is not in the shot, but in the shots. There is no limit to the number of possible chances, and for this reason one cannot exercise patience and let the game get very near, lest other chances should be lost. The real difficulty, then, in shooting driven game well is to shoot the far-off birds as soon as the gun will kill them, in order to change guns quickly and be ready again.

In pigeon shooting the double rise is the most difficult. Few kill half their birds at 25 yards rise, and still folk will talk of the difficulty of driven game as compared with flushed game. The author does not believe there is any pigeon shooter who can, even occasionally, kill a dozen blue rocks in double rises at 30 yards. He knows there are plenty of people who can frequently kill a dozen grouse, pheasants, and partridges driven overhead. And yet a rising blue rock is not “in it” with the spring of an October grouse, partridge, or snipe for quickness. A ten-year-old boy has been coached at the shooting school to kill driven game well, but nobody ever saw or will see a ten-year-old walk after October grouse and kill them well. An old man of eighty has made quite as good work as the rising generation at driven game, but not at shooting over dogs.

Still, pigeon shooting from traps is only now regarded as a test of skill by a very small and decreasing minority, and the reason is that the coming game has been invested with a difficulty that does not properly belong to it, and one that will grow less each year as the prejudice against going to school to learn skill with the gun decreases. At present it is not the townsman who finds driven game difficult, but the countryman who has learnt his shooting on game, but only a little of it, and who is “above” going to school again.

The rules for pigeon shooting can always be had from the Secretary of the Gun Club, Notting Hill; they are slightly changed occasionally, and therefore it is not wise to repeat them here. There are five traps, each of which is supplied with a pigeon, and either of these birds is released for the man at the mark to shoot at when he calls “Pull.” The operation of the traps is done by hand, but a hand that does not know which trap is to be opened.

Ordinary game weapons are of no use in these competitive pigeon matches. Guns are used of above 7 lbs., that will absorb the recoil of large charges of powder and shot, the latter of which is limited to 1¼ oz. The usual plan is to use small-sized shot, so that there shall be many of them in this weight of load, and to use enough powder to cause the light pellet to strike with as much energy as pellets a size larger from a game gun and charge of powder. Pigeon weapons used always to be chambered for 3 inch cartridges, but whether this will continue, now that concentrated powders have come in and are much used for pigeons, is doubtful.

Some very wonderful scores have been made in America by professional pigeon shots. Probably nothing is more deceptive than the scoring of long runs at pigeons, which may be the best blue rocks or very blundering slow-rising fowl. In America they have not had a very good class of pigeons, and their records are consequently not fairly comparable with those made in England at best blue rocks. The American birds are of the English race, but not of the blue rock variety. The latter are a domesticated breed of the wild rock pigeons of the coast caves, where its pursuit is vastly more difficult than shooting its cousins from a trap.

The records of kills of even best blue rocks do not tell us very much of the form of the men who made them. Some apparently very wonderful shooting was done half a century ago, at 40 yards rise. Later, guns were reduced in bore, and in weight and load; boundaries were shortened, and 12 bore charges of nitro powders were improved, so that conditions have varied from time to time so much that nobody can say with any certainty who were the best pigeon shots or at what period they lived. Probably Horatio Ross got out of a gun as great a proportion of its accuracy and power as any man who ever lived, and although the numbers of gunners who can shoot driven game well has greatly increased, the number who can shoot pigeons even moderately well has very much declined in England. Our countrymen now lose the Grand Prix de Monte Carlo with nearly as great certainty as formerly they won it. This does not appear to be because the competition is more severe than it was, for the author knows some winners of the Grand Prix whom he could not call first-rate shots. One of the writer’s first pigeon shooting matches was at a private house party at Vaynol Park. His experience there serves to illustrate the differences between good blue rocks and what are usually called “owls”; this term means any bird either bigger or with more white in it than a blue rock has, also it serves to show that an occasional “owl” is a good test of ready marksmanship. The writer had won a single stake, and only required one more bird out of the double rise stake to win that too. It was getting dusk, and the birds had been very smart. When the traps fell, two white ones came out and circled round to right and left as slowly as they could. Of course the shooter thought it an obviously soft thing to get them both; but “certainties” in shooting have a way of following the example of racing precedents. He missed both quite easily, and had to pay instead of to receive—except in “chaff.”

It might be thought that something should be said on the ethics of pigeon shooting, since the exigencies of polo have abolished it at Hurlingham, and the screeching brigade have rendered this as a moral victory in the press.

The author has bred pigeons in Lincolnshire dovecotes for this sport, and is not a bit ashamed of the fact. Moreover, as Edward VII. was at that time shooting them, the company is good enough.

THE WILD ROCK PIGEON

This bird generally has to be shot from a boat, and usually on a sea not as steady as it might be. The pigeons live in the cliff caves, and disturbance causes them to dash out with a speed and a twist that is highly productive of sport that is not very fatal to the birds.

It is clear that there are limits to the appreciation of difficulty in shooting, otherwise these cave rock pigeons would attract all those shooters who can never get pheasants high enough or fast enough for them. But they do not. There is certainly a chance of mingling the pleasures of sport with the pains of sea-sickness, and so an excuse of a kind for leaving the wild rock pigeon severely alone.

THE WOOD PIGEON