mtb tomt JKark*. 



By J. C. MANSBL-PLEYDELL, Esq., P.L.S., P.G.S. 

 (Read at Ablotsbury Sept. 15th, 1886J 



HE Abbotsbury decoy has a special interest, as it 

 is the only one in the county ; for the Morden 

 decoy has been disused for some years, and is 

 now only known as a favourite meet of the South 

 Dorset Hounds. The adjoining swannery is of 

 still greater interest. Nowhere else in the 

 United Kingdom is there so countless a number 

 of these Royal birds to be seen floating on the 

 calm surface of so large a piece of water, basking in the 

 sun, preening their feathers on the shore, or with measured 

 strokes of wing following each other in short flights to and 

 fro. Our Lord-Lieutenant, the Earl of Ilchester, is the 

 owner of these two county rarities. Decoys in their present 

 form were not in use much until the middle of the seventeenth 

 century ; before that period they were merely nets enclosing a 

 piece of water, converging to a point in the shape of a V with a 

 connected bag tunnel-net at the extremity, into which the 

 birds were finally driven ; these could only be used when the 

 wild fowl were in moult and the young birds unfledged, and 

 incapable of flight. Sir R. Payne Gallwey gives the derivation of 

 decoy to a Dutch compound word endekooy, duck-cage. The 



