THE LATEST METHODS OF PRESER- 

 VATION OF PARTRIDGES 



AT the present time there are in operation many more ways 

 of preserving partridges than ever before. Indeed, the 

 history of preserving these birds up to about 1 860 could hardly 

 be written for lack of material. For some strange reason, at the 

 period when stubbles were cut long (and the author has shot in 

 them a foot high as lately as 1870), and when partridges sat so 

 close to the points of dogs that to all appearances they could 

 have been easily exterminated, they nevertheless seemed to 

 require no artificial assistance, and even no designed limitation 

 of the reduction to the breeding stock. Perhaps it was that the 

 close crouching of the birds in good covert was the natural 

 method of assuring safety, and it may be that birds that could 

 escape detection by the dogs could also escape it by the foxes and 

 the vermin. 



The wilder the game is, and the more it runs, the more scent 

 it gives out to denote its presence to dogs ; and with guns ahead, 

 the birds that flush wild do not escape in driving, so that increase 

 of wildness is not all in favour of the game even upon shooting 

 days, and for the other 360 days of the year may possibly be 

 against them, and in favour of the vermin that hunts by smell. 



Whether this protection by the wits assists birds on their 

 nests at all, and if so, as much as the loss of scent does, is too 

 wide a question to enter upon here. It is only necessary to 

 remark upon that subject that partridge preservation is to be 

 divided, broadly speaking, into two sy .ems : first, that which 

 protects birds against foxes ; second, that which is not called 

 upon to add this heavy duty to the keeper's ordinary business. 



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