SCOLOPAX RDSTICOLA 25 



saw him use his beak to lever himself, as it were, into the air. This 

 time he pitched where I could not see him, and when he rose again 

 he evidently meant going, so I let liy and very nearly bagged an old 

 native woman in the next compound as well." 



In coanection with this little piece of swamp the same writer 

 has commented on the regularity with which Woodcock return year 

 after year to the same piece of ground. 



" I soon discovered that to find Woodcock witli any certainty 

 a good spaniel was required, as well as an intimate knowledge of the 

 ground, for one Woodcock succeeds another in a favourite spot, just 

 as one Trout succeeds another behind a big stone in a burn at home, 

 and in Shillong the places the cock mostly frequent are few and far 

 between. 



" The unwillingness of the cock to leave a favourite spot, so long 

 as any cover at all remains, is shown by the fact that botii last 

 season and the season before, I got an occasional bird within thirty 

 yards of my house, fifteen from a much-used footpath, and about fifty 

 from some stables. This was a cosy little bit of covert in the old 

 days, before the ground was so much built over. 



" There is a drain and slightly marshy bit of ground in the midst 

 of our Eegimental Lines where the cock feed at night still, although 

 the barracks have been inhabited for close on forty years." 



In England, of course, cock-shooting is indulged in under very 

 different circumstances and with very different results, and I was 

 fortunate enough on one occasion in Wales to participate in a shoot 

 in which three guns got forty-nine couple of cock in a very few hours. 

 We had been shooting three days a week over the rough country all 

 round the south coast, obtaining small, mixed bags of pheasant, 

 partridge, hare, &c., anything from ten to thirty brace a day, but 

 never, as far as I remember, had a cock shown itself. On the day 

 in question, a crisp November morning in 1894, we start our morning 

 trudge with a beat through some bracken bordered by a tiny copse 

 of oak and scrub on the crest and with a ditch and some swampy 

 ground at the foot of the hill. As we enter the bracken a hare breaks 

 and is neatly turned over in the open by H., the gun on my left hand. 

 The report, however, puts up a small covey of partridge, out of shot, 

 which sweep over the little copse and pitch in a field just ever Ihe 

 covert. Finishing the bracken without further result we turn round 

 and beat the far side of the hill for the partridge, I, as right-hand man, 



