SPRING RETURN OF WOODCOCKS IN P'ORTH AND CLYDE 145 



cover seven were shot by the ' guns ' outside. As sportsmen 

 know, two 'guns,' walking quietly with a spaniel, would probably 

 have accounted for a good many more. Our cover seldom 

 holds so many Woodcock per acre as equally adapted covers 

 which face the north and east. Torwood covers, where I 

 have seen thirty-five and thirty-eight shot in a day, face 

 north and east, and so, as seen above, do the covers of 

 Touch, which are the Woodcocks' favourite holds. Again on 

 the following Saturday (i 5th December) thirty-eight l were 

 shot on Mugdock ground, in the south-west of the county, 

 and on Torwood, above mentioned, thirty-two ; and I have 

 other returns to show the inrush, and probably continued 

 residence for ten days or more, of the autumn flights of 

 Woodcock in Central Scotland in 1906. 



In the history of the bird in this district I can go 

 back to 1865, when I found my first Woodcock's nest, duly 

 recorded at the time in the pages of the " Zoologist." 



The date of these eggs was 25th April, but they were 

 very hard set. I have already related elsewhere the late 

 hatching off of Woodcock in our covers here in 1902 ; and, 

 on that occasion, I accounted for the lateness, and for the 

 abnormal numbers nesting on our ground of both Woodcocks 

 and Snipe, by the sudden and great cold snap of 2nd and 

 3rd May, which recorded 17 of frost over a great part of the 

 North of Scotland ; and the succeeding north-east blizzard 

 of wind and sleet and snow, which continued well into June, 

 with little or no change in direction. As I have also related, 

 the large number of young Snipes hatched on our ground at 

 that late date in May, about the loth May 1902, perished, 

 and were found in numbers dead within a few feet of the 

 empty shells. Now, I think there can be scarcely any reason- 

 able doubt that both these large accessions of Snipe and Wood- 

 cock in Central Scotland in the late nesting season of 1902 

 (and again, almost similarly, in 1904) were directly due to 

 the first layings having been destroyed on the morning of that 

 phenomenal exposition by King Frost, viz. on the morning 

 of the 3rd May, over a large extent of their northern breeding 

 range in Scotland, and a consequent crushing down of the 

 Snipe and Woodcock population after that event; or otherwise, 



1 The usual average at Mugdock for a whole season is about that figure. 



63 c 



