SWAN SHOOTING. 



Swan shooting can hardly be characterized as a 

 sport, for the few swans that are killed are shot chiefly 

 by accident, when they fly over points where gunners 

 are concealed waiting for ducks, or at times when, with 

 the geese, they come up to goose decoys. Most of 

 those killed during the winter are secured in the Chesa- 

 peake Bay and on Currituck Sound, where they winter 

 in considerable numbers, flocks of two or three hundred 

 sometimes being seen. On the occasion of a freeze, 

 even larger numbers gather together, looking, as they 

 sit along the marsh or in the air holes, like great drifts 

 of snow. 



Swans are sometimes shot when standing on the 

 shore of the marshes ; this can only be done when the 

 wind is blowing hard on the shore. Under such con- 

 ditions the gunner is sometimes able to land at a dis- 

 tance from the bird, and to creep through the reeds, 

 within gunshot, since the swan cannot hear him on ac- 

 count of the wind. 



Swans decoy readily, and occasionally the profes- 

 sional gunners have a few wooden swan decoys on the 

 house boats which they inhabit and in which they m.ove 

 from place to place, but nowhere, so far as I am aware, 

 is the shooting of swans made a business. One or two 

 of the ducking clubs on Currituck Sound have small 

 stands of live swan decoys which have been captured 



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