282 BIRDS OF NOEFOLK. 



practice. The wonder is that any escape, and it is only 

 owing to the vast extent of the Scandinavian forests 

 and their thin population that any do so. From the 

 Swedish word (roa, to play, impf. roade), which 

 expresses this habit, comes the term "reading," used 

 by many Enghshmen in Scandinavia, and thus. Wheel- 

 wright, in his " Ten years in Sweden" (p. 195), says, 

 "I generally shoot them [woodcocks] here when they 

 are reading, and in a good stand can often kill three 

 or four in an evening. A friend in Gothenburg wrote 

 me word that, in the spring of 1864, he killed forty 

 woodcocks round that place when they first came over." 



With us, no doubt, the changes which have taken 

 place, during the last fifty or sixty years, in the cultiva- 

 tion of waste lands, many hundred acres of heath, wood, 

 and fen having been alike subject to the plough, with 

 the thinning of hedgerows and field timber generally, 

 have materially lessened the attractions of the soil; 

 and at the same time the strict preservation of game, 

 with the requirements of the "battue," make it im- 

 possible to arrive at any satisfactory estimate of the 

 numbers that now visit us in an average season. 



On all those estates where a considerable head of 

 game is reared for, probably at most, only three or four 

 days' sport towards the close of the year, the woods are 

 necessarily kept quiet until that period arrives; and 

 thus, although many flights of woodcocks from the 

 beginning of October may have rested there for awhile 

 and passed on scathless to more southern quarters, it 

 is quite possible that the very week of the "grand 

 battue" may produce only a few stragglers that have 

 located themselves for the winter. Of course the reverse 

 of this picture occurs at times, when severe weather 

 about Christmas has driven the cocks into close 

 cover; still the great bags made during some seasons 

 in Ireland, as recorded by Thompson and other authors. 



