18 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XX. 



fortunate enough on one occasion in Wales to participate in a shoot 

 in which three guns got 49 couple of cock in a very few hours. 

 We had been shooting three days a week over the rough country 

 all round the South Coast obtaining small, mixed bags of pheasant, 

 partridge, hare, &c, anything from ten to thirty brace a day but 

 never, as far as I remember, had a cock shown itself. On the day 

 in question, a crisp November morning in 1894, we start our morn- 

 ing trudge with a beat through some bracken bordered by a tiny 

 copse of oak and scrub on the crest and with a ditch and some 

 swampy ground at the foot of the hill. As we enter the bracken a 

 hare breaks and is neatly turned over in the open by H, the gun 

 on my left hand. The report, however, puts up a small covey 

 of partridge, out of shot, who sweep over the little copse and pitch 

 in a field just over the covert. Finishing the bracken without further 

 result we turn round and beat the far side of the hill for the par- 

 tridge. I, as right-hand man, taking the deep bracken lying just 

 inside the oak trees. We have only gone some hundred yards when 

 we walk into the birds, which have scattered a little, and four 

 are added to our bag. I have one shot and a miss at the partridge 

 but as I fire I catch a glimpse of what I am sure is a woodcock get 

 up and flit through the trees to my right, but on saying so I am 

 merely laughed at for my pains, as the cock are not supposed to be 

 in. 1 , however, insist on beating back through the spinney on my 

 own account and hardly have I got well inside when two cock are 

 up and off before I am ready for them. Within five paces, however, 

 another gets up and falls to my shot and as he falls another rises and 

 is missed. Before I can load the spaniels have another bird in the 

 air and before I have walked the spinney through five birds have 

 been dropped and at least as many more missed. After this the- 

 other guns come up and after inspecting my bag it is at once decid- 

 ed that a large flight must have just come in and that the original 

 day's shoot should be abandoned for the purpose of hunting up the 

 most likely places for the cock. 



Their favourite haunts along, these Coasts are the numerous small 

 copses and spinneys which nestle in between the hills, sometimes 

 running a little way up the sides, often surrounded with a fringe of 

 light scrub or gorse and nearly always with a tiny stream trickling 

 down the centre and losing itself in a swamp at the foot. We soon 



