x. PHEASANT SHOOTING (PART /) 161 



An unsuccessful day at pheasants is when the birds 

 are not properly driven to the guns, but are uninten- 

 tionally allowed, through ignorance of their habits, or 

 from carelessness, to escape without offering chances 

 to the shooters ; or again, if they do afford shots, 

 such are, from their low altitude, unsportsmanlike 

 ones. 



Besides careless management, downright bad luck 

 will now and then ruin a day's covert shooting. I 

 have several times seen a fox, more than once a cat, as 

 well as a stray sheep dog, spoil an entire afternoon's 

 sport by running through the end of a wood into 

 which several hundred pheasants had with no little 

 manoeuvring been collected, the result being that the 

 birds either rose en masse over the shooters, or flew to 

 all points of the compass but the one it was intended 

 they should go to. 



The larger the head of pheasants in a covert, the 

 more prone are they to follow one another in a wrong 

 direction when alarmed by the beaters ; and the greater 

 care will they require in management, if a proper per- 

 centage of their number are to fly over the shooters. 



I call to mind a large wood, always full of birds, 

 that is so frequently attended with bad fortune when 

 driven for the game it holds, that its owner defines 

 his pheasant shooting as * 364 days of anxiety and 

 expense, and one day of bitter disappointment.' 



ii 



