400 



WILD SPAIN. 



a safeguard ; the smaller packs could occasionally be out- 

 manoeuvred under cover of some reed-bed — but this only 

 with thirties, forties, or fifties ; the area covered by the 

 larger bodies outflanked even the most extensive juncales. 

 On the open water we have never yet succeeded (though 

 we have tried a hundred times) to approach these main 

 armies of duck, and believe now that it cannot be done. 

 Why this should be so is another question, and a curious 

 one. The nature of the duck-tribe is the same in Spain 

 as in England : wherever they are found they are among 

 the wildest and most wary of birds. Here, however, we 

 had them in numbers surpassing anything we have seen on 

 British waters, and frequenting, too, a region which seemed 

 pre-eminently adapted for the use of punt and big gun. 

 Yet we found them, on the desolate Spanish marismas, 

 many-fold more inaccessible to a punt than on the harassed 

 and heavily-shot harbours of England. The only reason 

 we can suggest is that, these waters never being traversed 

 by boats of any kind, the fowl are inclined to avoid a 

 gunning-punt as readily as they do a human being.* 



The impossibility of obtaining a good shot by fair means 

 being demonstrated, as a final resource we laid up the 

 punt among the sedges, at a point where the fowl were 

 wont to congregate. Here, at the end of two hours, we 

 had about a thousand birds before the gun : wigeon, 

 shovelers, and a few garganey, all mixed, with about a score 

 of pintails and three or four gadwall ; but, whether purposely 

 or by accident, the)' kept at very long range from our 

 sedgy shelter, and when at last, owing to a leaky seam 



* This failure of the gunning-punt in Spain is the niore inexplicable 

 as in Egypt — the only other southern land in which, to our knowledge, 

 this sport has been attempted — the very reverse was the case. An 

 Englishman who took out a punt to the Nile abandoned the pursuit, as 

 he found no difficulty in taking the craft to such close quarters that 

 he bagged fifty to sixty each shot. Similarly, Lord Londesborough 

 found the fowl in the Egyptian lagoons so easily accessible that, after 

 securing 2,290 geese and 1,300 ducks in the season (sixty-four geese 

 being his biggest shot), he abandoned further operations as lacking 

 the one essential condition — that of difficulty. (Badminton Library. — 

 " Shooting: Moor and Marsh," pp. 261-2.) 



