64 AMERICAN GAME, 
with continuous ice, forbidding them to obtain their food, 
and compelling them yet once again to take wing and 
fly more southward yet, to where no frost nor north-east 
tempest cometh. 
During this visit it is that they afford the most sport 
to the gunner, and that they are harassed, especially 
about Long Island, by every poacher’s device and arti- 
fice which can be devised to slay them, fairly or unfairly, 
by man, wholly without consideration, and reckless that 
the slaughter on their very feeding grounds is fast ban- 
ishing them from regions where, with all their watchful 
sentries out and on the alert, they are decimated hourly 
by. volleys from unseen and unsuspected foes. 
The worst, most murderous, and least sportsmanly of 
all these artifices is “the battery,” an engine long but 
vainly proscribed and prohibited by the New York Leg- 
islatures, but still in use in all the Long Island waters, 
though the shrewder, if not more honest or less poaching 
Jerseymen, tolerate it not in their lagoons and inlets, 
which still swarm with the fowl daily seen less and 
less in the Long Island bays. 
“The battery,” says a good writer in the Spirit of the 
Times, “is formed of a deal box, about seven feet long, 
three wide, and two deep; from the rim of this a plat- 
form of board runs off at right angles, about six feet on 
every side, and the interior is caulked to render it water 
tight. This is moored on some shoal where the birds 
are observed to be in the habit of resorting, and bal- 
