WILDFOWL SHOOTING IN THE FENS. 389 



make heavy shots in a flock. For, notwithstanding 

 they are from forty to seventy pounds weight, and 

 from seven to ten feet in the barrel, yet they are only 

 about an inch in the bore. Although, as an extra- 

 ordinary circumstance, the fen-gunners sometimes kill 

 from thirty. to forty birds at a shot, yet they now- 

 a-days consider it very good work to secure a dozen. 



This is nothing great, in comparison with what has 

 been formerly done on the coast ; for instance, from 

 thirty to forty wigeon, besides lost birds, killed from 

 the shoulder ; and from seventy to eighty different 

 wildfowl from a swivel gun. These, however, though 

 shots extremely rare, are not to be set down as ex- 

 travagant impossibilities, when we consider, that a 

 shoulder gun of twenty pounds weight may be fired 

 with half a pound, and a stanchion-gun with a pound 

 and a half of such shot, that any one grain of it 

 wight stop a bird ; and this shot (say even the large 

 letter A) has fifty grains to an ounce. 



The winter shooting in the fens is not what it 

 Avas ; as they have been much drained for cultivation, 

 by which the wild parts are less extensive; and the 

 use of large guns having, of late years, been the 

 order of the day here, as ivell as everywhere else, 

 the birds are now much wilder, and not so plentiful. 

 Putting this aside, however, the fens have not so 

 many advantages as people are led to suppose ; for, 

 should there be a hard frost, the whole of the reed 

 beds and meres become one continued sheet of ice, and 

 without a vestige of food for the birds ; unless, by 



