DUCK-SHOOTING. 375 



towards the unsuspecting birds, and when within arm's length, 

 catches one of them by the leg, and twitches it suddenly 

 under water, before it has time to alarm the rest, by crying 

 or fluttering its wings. He then moves towards another, 

 which he treats in the same way, and so on, till he has col- 

 lected as many as he can conveniently carry, attached to a 

 belt round his middle, and then he slowly retires, leaving 

 the floating calabashes amongst the Ducks. On another 

 part of the coast the same expedient is practised, excepting 

 that instead of a calabash, they use a sort of cap made of 

 rushes, similar caps being left to float amongst the flocks of 

 Ducks, to which they soon get as much accustomed as those 

 we first mentioned do to the calabashes. 



The Sheldrakes, which, as we have seen, build in rabbit- 

 burrows, are caught by snares placed before the hole, into 

 which the birds are traced by the marks of their feet on the 

 sand. In this country, our markets are supplied either by 

 those who are in the habit of shooting them, as a livelihood 

 during the Winter season, or from decoys, in which by far 

 the greater number are taken. In shooting, the great diffi- 

 culty is to get within gunshot, the Duck not only being very 

 watchful and timid, but possessed of so fine a sense of 

 smelling, that but for the precaution of approaching them to 

 leeward, or of holding a piece of smoking turf in the hand, 

 it is no easy matter to get within reasonable distance. The 

 guns, also, which are employed for this purpose, are much 

 longer than those in common use, and will kill at a much 

 greater distance. A Duck-shooter's life is often exposed to 

 great hazard ; the sport, if so it may be called, being carried 

 on usually in Winter, late in the evening, or early in the 

 morning, and most frequently in wet and marshy places, or 

 on the shores of wild and solitary estuaries, opening through 

 the lowlands near the sea. On these occasions some of them 

 prefer going without even a dog, the cold being often so 

 severe that no animal could bear it. 



Many of the favourite feeding-places consist of those 

 vast muddy flats, covered with green sea- weed, over which 



