CHAPTER Ix 
WILDFOWL-SHOOTING IN THE MARISMA 
ITS PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE 
Vast as their aggregations may be, yet wildfowl do not 
necessarily 
Long before the 
breech-loaders—even 
merely by virtue of numbers 
afford any sort of 
certainty to the modern fowler. Half-a- 
million may be in view day by day, but 
in situations or under conditions where 
searce half-a-score can be killed. This 
elementary feature is never appreciated 
by the uninitiated, nor probably ever will 
be, since Hawker’s terse and trenchant 
prologue failed to fix it.' 
What ‘the Colonel” wrote a century 
ago stands equally good to-day; and mutatis 
mutandis will probably stand good a 
century hence. 
authors had appeared on the scene with 
before the epoch of Hawker with his 
copper-caps and detonators—the Spanish fowlers of the marisma 
had already devised means of their own whereby the swarming 
wildfowl could be secured by wholesale. As a market venture, 
their system of a stalking-horse (called a cabresto) was deadly 
in the extreme and interesting to boot, affording unique 
opportunity of closely approaching massed wildfowl while still 
unconscious of danger. We have spent delightful days crouch- 
ing behind these shaggy ponies, and describe the method later. 
But this is not a style that at all subserves the aspirations of 
the modern gunner, and we here study the problem from his 
point of view. 
1 See Instructions to Young Sportsmen, by P. Hawker, second edition (1816), pp. 229, 2380. 
105 
