NATURE AND SPORT IN BRITAIN 



be fat and in high condition, provided the surroundings 

 are favourable, and its natural food worms, larvae, 

 small beetles, and other insects abundant. 



A well-grown woodcock will weigh about 12 ounces, 

 but fine specimens are occasionally shot reaching as 

 much as 16 and 18 ounces. Yarrell records a cock 

 which scaled as much as 27 ounces, but that must have 

 been a veritable giant and phenomenon even for the old 

 and good days. Our forefathers seem to have called 

 these inordinately heavy specimens " double woodcock," 

 but " double woodcock" have long vanished into the 

 limbo of the past, with dragons, giants, fairies, and 

 other fabled creatures. 



Here and there in favoured parts of England cock 

 are, as I have shown, at certain seasons to be found in 

 fair numbers. But life itself is not more uncertain 

 than their visitations, and in many localities where 

 once they appeared in some abundance they are now 

 seldom seen. I was speaking some twenty years back 

 to Archdeacon Philpott, who died no great while since 

 well on to his hundredth year. In his youth the Arch- 

 deacon had been a keen sportsman. He told me that 

 at the beginning of the last century he remembered 

 cock being exceedingly plentiful on the coast of Suffolk, 

 in the neighbourhood of Southwold. Occasionally, in 

 good years, a fair number of cock are shot in Norfolk 

 and Suffolk, in the coverts of the King, Lord Rendle- 

 sham, Lord Hastings, and other landowners. But as 

 a whole the east coast affords nothing like the plenty 

 of bygone times. It is not difficult to account for 

 the increasing scarcity of these most desirable of all 

 sporting birds. The number of gunners has enor- 

 mously increased all over Europe in the last fifty years, 

 and in the very nature of things cock cannot be pre- 

 served in the same manner as non-migratory game, like 



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