PLOVER-SHOOTING. 



BY E. HOUGH, 

 Of "Forest and Stream." 



LOVER- SHOOTING, as a sport, yearly 

 assumes a greater importance and attracts a 

 more general attention. Writers of the first 

 and second quarters of the century have 

 recorded that this bird, then plentiful to 

 the last degree all through the mid-continent, was not 

 pursued by the sportsman, on account of its insignifi- 

 cance, and was in danger only from market-shooters, who 

 killed it for sale. To-day, the scarcity of the grouse, the 

 quail, and other formerly abundant birds is causing 

 shooters who love the breezy uplands to cast about them 

 for new or practicable sport; and since the plover may 

 be said to fit a vacant season in the shooting-year, there 

 is a considerable and an additional interest taken in it as a 

 game bird. As a pastime, plover- shooting can not be called 

 wild, laborious, difficult, or dangerous, and it is there- 

 fore lacking in much that appeals to the hardy hunter's 

 nature; yet it has some peculiar and not uninteresting 

 features of its own a certain individual fascination, quite 

 capable of winning its own blind followers and devotees, 

 and that all-abiding and all-worthy charm of any sport 

 or occupation which calls us away from the desky and 

 dusty city, out into the wide fields and under the clear 

 sky. 



I did never like a lawyer's brief, with long "Whereas" 

 and "Therefore," nor did I ever fancy a book full of 



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