NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



sometimes a very large one, of fine and marketable 

 wildfowl. At Ashby, a famous Lincolnshire decoy, for 

 example, 113 wild duck have been netted in a single 

 operation, while 248 have been taken in a day. The 

 profits from the great decoys in the fen country, when 

 wildfowl were numerous, must have been very great. 

 Pennant, writing in the eighteenth century, instances 

 a single season in which 31,000 wild duck, widgeon, 

 and teal, the produce of ten decoys near Wainfleet, in 

 Lincolnshire, were sold in London alone. 



In the old days the fen wildfowlers had another 

 system of taking duck in large numbers. Their 

 methods are described by Willughby, a writer of the 

 seventeenth century. The ducks, while in moult, and 

 therefore unable to fly, were driven towards a certain 

 point by men in boats armed with long poles, with 

 which they splashed the water vigorously. The 

 affrighted fowl were thus forced into a system of netting, 

 and thereafter captured at leisure. This took place 

 during what we call now the " flapper" season, when 

 the young fowl are unable to fly and the old birds are 

 disabled by the moult. It was a deadly practice, and 

 one is not surprised to learn that in a single great drive 

 as many as 4,000 fowl were thus ensnared at Deeping 

 Fen. On another occasion 2,646 duck were taken in 

 two days near Spalding. The system was, however, 

 as wasteful as it was unfair, and it was put an end to 

 by an Act of Parliament in the time of Henry VIII. 

 It seems to have been a very old custom, and was in 

 existence certainly as far back as the reign of King 

 John. 



This method recalls a murderous duck-destroying 

 system formerly practised in Mexico, where vast quanti- 

 ties of wild duck were gently manoeuvred by Indians 

 towards a battery of seventy or eighty musket-barrels, 



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