]78 FRANK FOKESTER S FIELD SPORTS. 



plain, covered with rich, tender grass, and interspersed at every 

 few paces with brakes of alders, and willow bushes. The num- 

 bers I have seen, on that ground, are incredible. In 1 839 I shot 

 over it, accompanied by my friend, Mr. Ward, of Warwick, who 

 then weighed above three hundred pounds, and shot with a 

 single-barrelled Westley Richard's gun ; and, in three succes- 

 sive days, we bagged fifty-seven, seventy-nine and ninety-eight 

 Cock, over a single brace of dogs, not beginning to shoot until 

 it was late in the morning. On the following year, with a 

 friend from New- York, I shot on the same ground all day the 

 first, and until noon on the second ; bagging, on the first, one 

 hundred and twenty-five birds, and, on the second morning, 

 seventy. The first of these days was intensely hot ; and the 

 ground became so much foiled by running of the innumerable 

 birds, that, although we had excellent retrievers, we lost, 

 beyond doubt, forty or fifty birds ; and at four in the afternoon 

 we were entirely out of ammunition. 



I am perfectly satisfied that, if we had been provided with a 

 brace of fresh dogs, at noon, with clean guns, and a proper sup- 

 ply of powder and copper caps, both of which gave out, it 

 would have been perfectly easy, on that day to have bagged 

 from one hundred, to one hundred and fifty couple of Wood 

 cock. 



The shooting on that ground is now ended. The Erie rail- 

 road passes within ten miles of it, and it is now oveiTun with 

 city poachers and pot-hunters ; besides being shot incessantly 

 by the farmers' boys and village idlers of the neighborhood, 

 who have begun to compete with the New York vagabonds in 

 supplying the markets with game. 



I confess that I have often wondered that the owners of these 

 tracts have not had the shrewdness to discover that by enforcing 

 the laws, and prohibiting trespassers, they might annually let the 

 shooting of these ranges for very considerable sums. " The 

 Drowned Lands " are in general held in large farms, and the best 

 shooting is all owned, comparatively speaking, by a very few 

 individuals. I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that 



