NOVEMBER. 



DUCK-SHOOTING- ON THE 

 BROADS. 



BY OSWALD CRAWFURD. 



All ducks are grey in the dark, might pass as a proverb with the 

 flight-shooter who practises his sport at nightfall, or with the punt- 

 shooter who works when the deeper shades of night are on him, 

 and at times can see so little of the form and colour of his quarry 

 that he points his great punt-gun towards, and fires at the mere 

 sound of feeding wild-fowl. The shooter by daylight, however, 

 needs to be something of a field naturalist, and to know a mallard 

 or a pintail from a scaup, a smew, or a merganser. If he fail to 

 distinguish his Ducks, he may easily fill his game-bag with some of 

 the most uneatable of winged creatures. 



Ducks are divided, not so much by the naturalist as by the sports- 

 man, into two distinct kinds the diving Ducks, or those which 

 seek their food at the bottom of the water ; and the non-divers, or 

 those which only dip their heads beneath the water for food, but 

 not their bodies ; or, if they dive, dive but a little way down. The 

 divers seem to find some very questionable food in the muddy 

 depths, for the flesh of nearly all of them is fishy in taste, tough, 

 oily, and unfit for food. Among the divers are the pochard, the 

 golden dye, the different kind of scoters, together with the smew, 

 scaup, and merganser above mentioned. These Ducks are all, as a 

 rule, frequenters of the sea, and all except the pochard nearly un- 



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