BLACKGAME 203 



and rowan. The lower grounds are broken by tortuous 

 cleughs or glens, shaggy with lichen-clad alder and 

 saugh, or by some rock-girt burn — such are the favourite 

 haunts of blackgame. Here, as a September sun shines 

 through scattered birchwood upon massed bracken and 

 the variegated undergrowth beneath, amidst which the 

 setters are bustling about, their russet coats in sharp con- 

 trast with dark rush and paler fern, surely one has as fair 

 a scene as eye need wish to contemplate. 



Young blackgame are the slowest of game-birds to 

 attain maturity. Hatched early in June, they are not 

 full-grown till the middle of September ; and during their 

 four-months' adolescence, are certainly the softest and 

 most tender of all game-birds — in contrast with their 

 strong and hardy nature when adult. Even when three- 

 parts grown, a young blackcock, if raised two or three 

 times on a wet day, becomes so draggled and exhausted 

 as to be unable to fly. The habits of young blackgame 

 are analogous with their tardy development, and through- 

 out August and great part of September they are the 

 tamest of game. Then comes an accession of strength 

 and wildness what time they cast the little pointed ruddy 

 tails of their nestling-plumage ; and, within a few weeks, 

 even days, the young blackcock, from being the tamest, 

 becomes the wildest of all our game-birds. 



To shoot blackgame in August— whether old or 

 young, and when the latter are hardly bigger than quail, 

 and the cocks indistinguishable from the hens — is not 

 only unsportsmanlike in itself, but so suicidal a policy that 

 one cannot understand anyone being guilty thereof. Yet 

 the massacre of young "grey" is lamentably prevalent 

 on the Borders. Wretched little fledglings are sacrificed 

 on the Twentieth, presumably because that is the date 



