94 -NATTJBAL HISTOEY SKETCHES. 



us, nobody seemed rightly to know. For about a month 

 from this time, a man who knows just where to look for 

 them can have some rattling sport. The most I ever killed 

 in one day was eleven couple and a half ; and this was not 

 an individual day's luck, for pigeons were so thick in the 

 month of February in that year, in the honeysuckle and 

 .shey-oak scrub on the beach, when I was camped at 

 Mordialloc, that I averaged with my own gun twenty-five 

 couple per week for above a month. Although the 

 pigeons flock here, they generally rise singly ; or, if two 

 or three fly up together, they are so wide apart that you 

 rarely kill more than one with each barrel, and you never 

 get a "family shot," as you can into a flock of wood-pigeons 

 at home. I have occasionally killed two at a shot, young 

 birds, sitting together on the same branch. The coo of 

 the pigeon is deep and loud, principally heard at night 

 and morning, and often leads the shooter up to them in 

 the forest. The surest but most pot-hunting method of 

 killing pigeons is to creep up to them as they sit on the 

 bare limb of a tree ; and a dull, warm, rainy day is the 

 best for this kind of shooting. The blacks are the boys 

 for this work. A certain way of killing pigeons is to 

 watch by a water-hole on a summer's night, just as the 

 sun goes down, when they come to drink ; and I have 

 killed eight or ten in an evening at a favourite hole, and 

 this in not a very good pigeon country ; but they will 

 come a long way to water. When "reading" woodcocks 

 in the north, the first appearance of the evening star 

 was the signal for the shooter to take his stand in the 



