192 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
together, the chiefest plenty between Michaelmas and Christ- 
mas, and in these three months he visitest most houses [dead 
ones, that is, are brought in for eating]. Their chief taking 
is in cockeroades in woods, with nets erected up between two 
trees, where in cocke shoote time (as it is termed) which is the 
twilight, a little after the breaking of the day, and before the 
closing of the night, they are taken, sometimes two, three or 
four at a fall [of the net]. I have myself oftentimes taken 
six at one fall, and in one roade at an evening taken eighteen ; 
and it is no strange thing to take a hundred, or six score, in one 
wood in twenty-four hours if the haunt be good, and much 
more hath been taken; though not usually. ... The plenty 
of this, and other kind of fowl hath been such in a hard winter, 
as I have heard a gentleman of good sort and credit report that 
he had bought in St. David’s two Woodcocks, two Snipe, and 
certain Teal and Blackbirds for a penny.” 
If the Woodcocks arrived in Pembrokeshire, as Owen 
tells us, a fortnight before Michaelmas, that is about the 15th 
of September, their habits must have changed somewhat, as 
Welsh sportsmen do not expect them so early as that now, nor 
do they any longer come in the same plenty as formerly. 
The cocke shoote or cockshot referred to by Owen was a 
well-known device, consisting of one or more nets suspended 
in some convenient ride, while the cockeroades were the 
aforesaid rides or glades, up and down which the Woodcocks 
were expected to fly about twilight. The practice of netting 
Woodcocks was so general as to suggest the employment of 
the phrase “ cock-shut time” as a synonym for twilight as 
in the play of “ Richard III.” 
1605. CAROLUS CLUSIUS. 
We next come to consider the labour of a great Flemish 
botanist, de PEscluse, a physician of Arras, whose name is 
usually latinised into Clusius. To criticise Clusius’s figure 
of the Solan Goose to be found in the “ Exoticorum Libri 
decem,’’* a quaint, but on the whole creditable representation, 
would hardly be just. The block drawn and engraved from 
a sketch by Clusius’s correspondent, James Plateau, which by 
the good offices of Dr. B. D. Jackson I am able to reproduce, 
* 1605, Bk. V., Ch. VITI., p. 103. 
