44 THE WOODCOCK. 
know if it is still made use of in any of the more remote parts of 
Great Britain. Another method employed by our forefathers 
was to place nets between trees across the open glades or rides 
jn a wood, down which the woodcock would pass in their 
crepuscular flight. In George Owen’s “Description of Pem- 
brokeshire,’’ written in 1602, we read there was marvellous 
“plentie ’’? of woodcock in that country from Michaelmas to 
Christmas: where they were taken “in cock shoote tyme (as yt 
ys tearmed) which is the twylight,’’ when “yt ys no strange 
thinge to take a hundred or six score “in one wood in ’X Xiiij or 
houres.’’ He speaks of a wood having thirteen “ cock-shots,”’ 
and further on states these birds “are not our countryeman 
borne ;’’? so that then as now the British sportsman depended 
greatly for his sport on the influx of the foreigner. Woodcock 
can and do run very swiftly along the ground, their mode of 
progression being in quick little “bursts,’’ like that of plovers. 
I know of a wire-netting rabbit-proof fence, where on more than 
one occasion a woodcock running precipitately forward, has got 
his bill and head through the meshes of the netting, and has 
thus been caught. In July, 1905, I found a woodcock caught 
firmly round the neck in a snare set for rabbits, in which case 
it is difficult to conjecture why it could not make good its escape 
from so large a noose. Lighthouses (particularly on a misty 
night) prove no less a death-trap to these birds, than to so many 
other of our migrants; and one often finds the bodies of wood- 
cock lying dead below telegraph wires against which they have 
flown and been killed. Perhaps the most curious and _ least 
known trait of the woodcock is its supposed capacity for surgi- 
cally treating its wounds. Professor Victor Fatio, in a lecture 
delivered to the Geneva Physiological Society on April 19th, 
1888, gave five instances where he had shot woodcock which had 
applied plasters, made of feathers and blood, to wounds in the 
back and breast, and had in similar fashion in three other cases 
made ligatures of feathers round broken legs. From a colonial 
paper I quote the account of a similar operation, performed by 
the North American woodcock (Scolopax Philohela Minor), a 
first cousin of the woodcock we meet with in our British Isles. 
The account runs :— One day, while sitting quietly by a brook, 
a woodcock fluttered out into the open, and made his way to a 
spot on a bank of light, sticky mud and clay. The bird was 
