162 TEN YEARS OF GAME-KEEPING 
pigeon’s crop the better. So tightly will pigeons 
pack their crops with greens that on occasion they 
must afford the birds considerable protection from 
shot. I have fired at a pigeon flying over me with 
no other visible effect than to cause a shower of 
greens from its punctured crop. To illustrate the 
quantity of greens a pigeon will ‘stuff’ into its crop, 
Gilbert White relates in ‘Selborne’ how a wood- 
pigeon was served up, accompanied by a dish of the 
most delicious turnip-greens, taken from its crop. 
Many a time I have supplied my fowls with a 
meal of grain emptied from the crops of pigeons I 
had shot. A keeper acquaintance one autumn was 
waiting for pigeons which fed on some _ barley 
stubble; and to pass away the intervals between 
the arrivals of the birds, he counted the grains of 
barley in the crop of one pigeon. There were a 
thousand and thirty-three, besides a few small snail- 
shells. 
Foggy weather brings a famous chance to get in 
touch with wood-pigeons. The shooting, of course, 
is not so difficult as in clear weather—not so much 
because the birds fly slower, but because you are 
able to kill a pigeon coming towards you before it 
sees you. In clear weather this seldom is possible. 
It is that backwards, forwards, downwards, upwards, 
lightning swerve of the wood-pigeon in clear weather 
that beats so many men, and has beaten me a great 
many more times than I care to remember. The 
