La Mancha 189 
At these earlier tivadas a good gun should be able, with ease, to 
bring down, say, 400 ducks, although this number dwindles sadly in 
the pick-up, since but few of those birds will be recovered that fall 
outside the narrow space of open water around each “hide.” One 
may say roughly that at least one-fourth are lost. For, although 
each post be surrounded by open water, yet many ducks must fall within 
the encircling canes, while even those that fall in the open, if winged and 
beyond the reach of a second barrel, will inevitably gain the shelter of 
the covert, and all these are irrecoverable. Others, again, carrying on a 
few yards, may fall dead in open water, but at a distance the precise 
position of which is difficult to fix by reason of intervening cane-brakes. 
Thus between those that are lost in the above ways and others that may 
be carried away by the wind or the current (besides many that are 
devoured by hawks and eagles under the fowler’s eye but beyond the 
range of his piece) it is no exaggerated estimate that barely three-fourths 
of the fallen are ever recovered. 
To the above description another Spanish friend, Don Isidoro 
Urzaiz, adds the following :— 
In the year 1892 I fired at ducks in a single morning at Daimiel 
one thousand and ten cartridges. This was between 6.30 and 10.30 a.m. 
I gathered rather over two hundred, losing upwards of a hundred more. 
I shot badly ; it being my first experience with duck, I had not learnt to 
let them come well in, and often fired too soon. 
In subsequent tivadas I have never enjoyed quite so much luck, 
although never firing less than 400 to 500 cartridges. In spite of the 
difficulty of recovering dead game, I have always on these occasions 
gathered from one hundred upwards—the precise numbers I have not 
recorded. Some of the puestos have a very small extent of open water 
around them, and in these a greater proportion of the game is necessarily 
lost. For example, in a single quite small clump of reeds I remember 
marking not less than thirty ducks fall dead, yet of these I recovered 
not one. The sharp-edged leaves of the sedge (masiega) cut like a knife, 
and the boatman who entered the reeds to collect the game returned a 
few minutes later without a bird, but with hands, arms, and legs bleeding 
from innumerable cuts and scratches, which obliged him to desist from 
further search. This is but one example of the difficulty of recovering 
fallen game. 
As examples of the totals secured individually in a day may 
be quoted the following. At the first shooting in 1908 the 
Duke of Arién gathered 251 ducks, and at the second shoot, 245, 
the Duke of Prim, 197. The record bag was made some ten or 
twelve years ago by a Valencian sportsman, Don Juan Cistel, 
