74 TAETEIDGE SHOOTING. 



remarkable. Let an intruder stumble on a partridge s 

 nest, and he shall find, in the midst of a sort of 

 scrambling uproar — the cries of the parents, and the 

 bustle of the brood — that the mother bird will hop 

 limping away, as though her wdngs were broken, or 

 as though, maimed and w^omided, she threw herself 

 on the mercy of the enemy. Both parents are as- 

 siduous in the nurture of the young. We find in 

 Selby's first volume of " Illustrations of British Or- 

 nithology," an instance of the \dgorous defence this 

 usually timid bird will make when pushed to ex- 

 tremity, and actuated by the parental instinct: — 

 "A person engaged in a field not far from my resi- 

 dence, had his attention arrested by some objects on 

 the ground, which, upon approaching, he fomid to be 

 two partridges, a male and female, engaged in battle 

 with a carrion crow: so successful and so absorbed 

 were they in the issue of the contest, that they 

 actually held the crow till it was seized and taken 

 from them by the spectator of the scene. Upon 

 search, the young birds, lately hatched, were found 

 concealed amongst the grass. It would appear, there- 

 fore, that the crow, a mortal enemy to all kinds of 

 young game, in attempting to carry off one of these, 

 had been attacked by the parent birds, and with the 

 above singular success." In similar instances, of the 

 heroism of instinct, may be traced the affinity of all 

 animal classes in the world's space. Even as the 

 human parent will overcome the instinct of self- 

 preservation by the heart's impulse, or the body's 



