164 BIRD LIFE IN ENGLAND. 



gun has brought down, he might be just as profitably em- 

 ployed " blazing " into a bandbox full of sparrows. By far 

 the happier method of business is to take a personal interest 

 and a personal responsibility in all going on. These English 

 partridges feed chiefly during the quiet hours after sunrise 

 and before sunset. When, in the morning, the head of the 

 covey has stuffed out his russet gorget with a sufficiency of 

 ripe seeds and a flavouring of insect life perhaps, he betakes 

 himself, with all the members of his household, to a dry and 

 sunny spot where digestion and meditation may go on undis- 

 turbed. Birds will be found in the fallows and green crops 

 at all hours of the day when they have been disturbed. A 

 little practice soon enables the keen sportsman to know by 

 instinct where they ought to be, and it is curious how seldom 

 his intuition fails him. 



We beat two or three fields with fair success, and try 

 them along the warm side of a " hanger " or sloping wood, 

 there making some varied additions to the bag. The rabbits, 

 for instance, have come out, and lie close until disturbed by 

 the dogs, when they flash across the green turf of the road- 

 way under fire of the innermost gun. Wood pigeons, too, 

 undertake rash peregrinations from amongst the last crisp 

 yellow leaves of the Spanish chestnuts, and are tumbled 

 unhesitatingly amid a cloud of feathers into the fern and 

 ling. Surely there is no such bird as the ringdove for shed- 

 ding its plumage. We have shot many, and yet never one 

 that had its feathers fixed to its cuticle with any reasonable 

 firmness. A hare occasionally comes deliberately out of the 

 ditch and limps along till a stop is put to her vagaries, and 

 the keeper parting the strong sinews of one leg, thrusts the 

 other through the opening, carrying the big beast thus on a 

 stick; she is too heavy and gross for delicately feathered 

 company. A pheasant is, mayhap, the next bird that falls, 

 rising behind the leftmost gunner from a clump of oak 

 springs, never struggling after he was struck, but coming 

 down heavily through the bare saplings. 



