COCK SHOOTING 85 



not he falls in with a big flight of birds small and stocky in body, 

 or a score or so of more largely developed morsels of tender flesh, 

 during the late autumn the thing is at all times possible, and that 

 is enough to keep up the spirits of your born cock shooter. 



Successful sport may be had in a great variety of covert. Occa- 

 sionally, very late in the season, when flights of birds are assembled 

 near the seacoast and in the neighbouring meadows and low-lying 

 pasture lands, just previously to their final migration towards winter 

 quarters, they may be shot on a sunny morning after a severe night's 

 frost in perfectly open ground, or at least in such slight covert as is 

 offered by frost-bitten bracken. On such occasions the birds are 

 apt to be rather listless and to drop again when flushed at no great 

 distance away. Instances of open shooting may often thus occur 

 in the south-west corner of the peninsula of Nova Scotia, in the 

 counties of Digby and Yarmouth, where it sometimes happens 

 that the final flight of birds does not get away until early in 

 December, after a few inches of snow have whitened the ground. 



Perhaps an infallible find for a woodcock family is where some 

 little mountain brook comes tumbling down to a dead water over 

 a gentle declivity, where, as it flows on, here and there a flat marsh 

 is formed. In this secluded marsh the tinkling brooklet saunters 



and stops round the natural vegetation of a hillside marsh, which 

 is alder brake. Round the roots of the alders it piles up soft mud, 

 and in the mud feed many earthworms on the decaying vegetable 

 matter. Such a spot is the natural home of the woodcock, 



