Practical Game-Preserving. 256 



following morning. The range of coops should be placed 

 at favourable spots not too close to the margin of the 

 water. No hard-and-fast rule may be laid down as to this 

 detail ; but endeavour should be made so to situate the 

 coops that there may be some small individual feature 

 which will mark out each coop's position to its denizens. 



For the first two or three weeks the feeding should take 

 place three times a day, additions, however, being made 

 to the food hitherto given in the form of barley-meal and 

 oatmeal, which must gradually replace the duck-meal 

 formerly supplied. They should be scalded with the 

 latter at first ; but as this is replaced, so the scalding may 

 become less, until, when the wild-duck meal is finally dis- 

 pensed with, the other meal may be merely moistened. 

 Clean, sweet house-scraps of meat, vegetable, potato, and 

 the like may in due course be added to the other food, and 

 if nothing of the kind be available, boiled rabbit meat, 

 chopped up, proves a desirable substitute and addition. 



After two or three weeks' feeding as above described, the 

 ducklings will soon come to whole grain as their food. 

 In this connection the over-abundant use of maize cannot 

 be too carefully avoided. That cereal has been freely 

 recommended by some writers for the purpose of wild- 

 duck feeding, and to this fact much of the failure to rear 

 good and wild wild duck is to be traced. It makes them 

 fat, bad fliers, and bad stay-at-home birds, impairs their 

 egg-producing powers, and is, unless as an exceptional 

 food, rather deleterious than beneficial in its effects. Some 

 of the firms who supply wild-duck grain incorporate it in 

 their mixtures; but some do not, and where such is pur- 

 chased the presence of maize must be looked for and 

 provided against. The basis of all wild-duck food from 

 the time the young ducks are able to take whole grain 

 should be home-grown and thoroughly sound wheat, 



