282 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
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 “roading,” used 
by many Englishmen in Scandinavia, and thus, Wheel- 
wright, in his “Ten years in Sweden” (p. 195), says, 
“T generally shoot them [woodcocks] here when they 
are roading, 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, 
