PREFACE 
It is perhaps the fact of collaboration which makes a preface toa book 
of this sort necessary. 
More than two years ago Mr. Stanley Duncan and myself agreed 
that a complete Wildfowler should be written. A good deal of 
material was already available, most of it consisting of Mr. Stanley 
Duncan’s constant and valuable contributions to Zhe Shooting Times 
and Zhe Field on the subject of wildfowling, the rest being my own 
notes extending over a considerable period of one’s sporting life. 
From the time of Colonel Hawker until fifteen years ago, all the pub- 
lished books upon wildfowling were excellent in their measure and in 
their day. The later books have been excellent also, but have been 
shorter and more in the fashion of the handbook or manual. It 
seemed good, therefore, to the collaborators that they should make a 
sustained effort to produce a book which might possibly be a standard 
work for a considerable period. 
It will be as well to give some indication of the respective parts 
taken by the collaborators in the production of this work. It has 
fallen to me to be the general editor. It has been a labour of love 
and a strange relief from the continuous production of fiction. 
The book, however, owes its real value undoubtedly to the work in 
it of Mr. Stanley Duncan, the chief organiser and honorary secretary 
of the Wildfowlers’ Association, and a sportsman whose name is as 
well known to all fowlers as his genial personality and remarkable 
excellence with the gun is known to a certain section of them. 
I myself have written the introductory parts and the chapters deal- 
ing with guns and ammunition, ‘‘ The Complete Gun-Room,” etc. 
etc. The important branch of shore shooting and the chapters on 
punt-gunning have been written by Mr. Stanley Duncan, though 
edited by me. The illustrations and diagrams are also the work of 
Mr. Stanley Duncan. 
The ornithological part is a joint production, with the aid of many 
of the leading authorities upon the subject. 
I have here to say, and I say it with some complacency, that the 
chapter upon shoulder guns was submitted to Mr. W. W. Greener 
himself; one or two suggestions he made I very gladly incorporated. 
