COLLECTING AND TRAPPING 



Gallwey and many others have done, get some rarities now 

 and then not to be got otherwise. In addition to the works 

 previously mentioned, there are quite a number which deal with 

 shore-shooting and wild-fowl gunning.^ 



Decoy-birds, whether artificial or natural, are great aids to 

 the collector armed with a gun, and probably every one knows 

 how easily wood-pigeons are attracted either by feathered or 

 wooden lures. The simplest method is, when one is shot, to 

 prop it up in as natural a position as possible, and for the 

 shooter to hide within a reasonable distance. An improvement 

 on this is figured and described by Lord Walsingham (indebted 

 to Mr. J. E. Harting),^ which consists in cutting a piece of wire 

 netting into a long oval, and applying it to the under surface 

 of the body so as to clasp the bird and keep it upright when 

 fixed on short sticks for the ground, or on branches of trees. 



The next is a wooden decoy carved and painted to repre- 

 sent the bird ; and the best of all, perhaps, is a stuffed wood- 

 pigeon, which, with leg-wires projecting, may be fixed upon 

 a branch. As with pigeons, so with other birds, and ducks and 

 many shore-birds are attracted by similar methods. Probably 

 every shore-shooter knows that a gull or tern shot down is an 

 almost certain lure for others, if not picked up at once ; but 

 that they will come to bright tin or blackened paper cut to 

 shape is surprising, and was not calculated upon by the writer, 

 who, however, saw a man collecting birds for the feather-trade 

 by this method. He had, with some ingenuity, built himself a 

 hiding-place, on the bare shore, of pieces of wreck, seaweeds, 

 broken baskets, and other flotsam and jetsam, some distance 

 from which he had stuck up these rude imitations — in profile, be 

 it remembered, and all head to windward, which is a rule to be 



1 Instructions to Young Sportsmen in all that Relates to Guns and Shooting, by 

 Lieut. -Col. P. Hawker (ninth edition best) ; The Wildfowler, Folkard ; The Gun aiui 

 its Development, W. W. Greener ; Practical Wild-fowling, by Henry Sharp, 1895. 



2 Shooting (Field and Covert), Badminton Library, pp. 228 and 230. 



