WINTER SHOOTING ON LAKE ONTARIO. 453 



time ; the water will feel decidedly more pleasant and 

 flowers are much cheaper. 



WINTER DUCK SHOOTING ON LAKE ONTARIO. 



That duck shooting is hard work and entails much 

 exposure and suffering and danger, is a saying so fa- 

 miliar that it has passed almost into a proverb. Not 

 infrequently we hear of men having been drowned or 

 frozen to death while duck shooting late in the season, 

 and cases of actual suffering are common. A form of 

 sport in which there is much exposure and sometimes 

 not a little danger is practiced at different points on the 

 Great Lakes in winter, and the methods pursued are 

 well described by Mr. Olin B. Coit, of Oswego, N. Y., 

 in the following article contributed by him to Forest 

 and Stream in the year 1895. He says: 



Methods of hunting the same kind of game differ 

 with the location and the season. There is no mode of 

 ducking that is so novel or attended with greater dis- 

 comfort and danger than winter shooting on Lake On- 

 tario. The ducks that make their homes in these icy 

 waters are whistlers, broadbills, coots, sheldrakes and 

 old-wives. The three latter kinds are fish ducks and 

 on the coast are strong and inferior in flavor, for they 

 there live on fish and sea food. But the lake usually 

 furnishes each autumn several cargoes of barley and 



