x. PHEASANT SHOOTING (PART /) 165 



their lu-juls. and with scarce a feather ruffled; but it 

 requires very neat and accurate shooting to do this ; 

 for, if a really low bird is allowed to pass one yard too 

 far, or is struck anywhere but in the head and neck, 

 a bolsterful of feathers and a mangled body is the 

 consequence a truly horrible sight ! 



A cloud of feathers falling from a pheasant is 

 always a sign that the bird was hit too much in the 

 body. Very few feathers, and these only small ones, 

 prove the centre cluster of shot was placed chiefly in 

 the head and neck ; and it is the birds struck in this 

 fashion that crumple up so dead to the gun, heads 

 down, tails up, and without sloping or fluttering to 

 the ground. 



Unless under exceptional conditions it is far more 

 sportsmanlike, and withal much safer, to spare all 

 really low birds. A low-flying pheasant seldom flies 

 far, and will probably be driven back to you as a high 

 shot later on, when there is some satisfaction in 

 killing it. The man who spares low birds, especially 

 low hens, deserves as much respect from his host as 

 the man who kills the high ones. 



One word more on killing pheasants ; it is this : 

 ' Spare the hens.' If cock and hen pheasants fly 

 over at the same moment, make a point of killing the 

 former, in preference to the latter. Nothing shows a 

 sportsman to greater advantage than his habit of 

 out the cock birds for his gun. 



If, for instance, a cock and a hen pheasant fly 



