WILDFOWL SHOOTING IN THE FENS. 405 



the barrel, yet they are only about an inch in the bore. 

 Although, as an extraordinary 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 

 heen 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 wild- 

 fowl from a swivel gun. These, however, though shots 

 extremely rare, are not to be set down as extravagant 

 impossibilities, when we consider, that a shoulder gun 

 of twenty pounds weight may be fired with half a 

 poun^ and a stanchion gun with a pound and a half 

 of such shot, that any one gram of it might 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 was ; 

 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 well 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 con- 

 tinued sheet of ice, and without a vestige of food for 

 the birds ; unless, by the way, you take the precaution 

 to keep a place open for them, which plan answers most 

 admirably, to get the, very best shots that can be made. 

 But should the weather be open, the greater part of the 

 wildfowl remain in the decoys during the day-time, and 

 this marshy country is too much extended to select any 



