A Roccolo in Italy.



33



accompanying the action with a shrill high-sounding blowing

whistle through his teeth in imitation of the descent of a large

winged bird. The Linnets or Goldfinches, or whatever they may

happen to be, hearing the sound and seeing the wicker racquet

hurtling towards them, mistake it for a hawk, and immediately

dive down amongst the trees only to be immeshed in the spiders’

web of fine nets, which not only encircle the whole bower, but

also stretch across within the Roccolo in more than one place.

The nets are of fine thread, and are full of pockets from top to

toe. Diiectly a bird flutters against one, it falls into a pocket

and has no more chance of escape.


All round the tops of the entwined saplings which form

the circle, small cages are fastened in which are the decoys.

Chaffinches, Hawfinches, Linnets, Titmice, Thrushes, Bramble

Finches, etc. The older and staider ones call repeatedly, and the

Chaffinches break into song. It is the only song to be heard in

Italy at the time of the autumn migration. What an irony !

For the rest, the fowlers and the cacciatori (hunters)—“ sports¬

men ” I suppose they call themselves—are everywhere with their

abominable nets and their guns.


The poor biids are not given much chance of singing !

One would laugh if one was not so disgusted, to see a well to do

Italian “ cacciatore ” issue forth fora day’s shooting, often garbed

in impossible knicker bockers and stockings with yellow button

boots very long and turned up at the points. A gun and a

cartridge-bag and a “cane di caccia ”—generally a mongrel

pointer. And there he goes stalking a Tom-tit, and banging

here, there and everywhere, not infrequently just by the high

road itself, and also not infrequently sending a shower of small

shot rattling about your head as you sit in your garden. I have

seen some of these gentry shooting at House Martins. If their

grandmothers were good to eat they’d shoot them.


But I have strayed again from that hateful Roccolo, (bye-

the-bye ! the first “o” is long, the last two short in pronouncing

the word, and in Italian the “o” is as round as that of Giotto’s).


Besides the decoys in cages, some Chaffinches or Green¬

finches are tied round their bodies by string, which latter ascends

from the ground within the circle to the hand of the fowler up in



