Birds. 



5985 



the bird, looked upon as lost, fall, and while speaking to a farmer find 

 myself almost treading on it, my dog being just as far from smelling 

 it now as before. Yet no one can contend that the dead bird sup- 

 presses its scent. The fact was this bird had fallen into a hollow, so 

 that, had I not been occupied with the second barrel, I could not 

 have actually seen it to the ground ; and in that hollow there were 

 probably certain forces — analogous to those producing eddies in 

 water, and whirlwinds, small or great, in the air — acting on the currents 

 in the atmosphere, which conveyed the scent upwards, instead of hori- 

 zontally or nearly so ; while the bird, having fallen dead, had left no 

 scent on the earth, except just the few inches it covered as it lay. 



But the great objection to the theory of suppression, in my mind, 

 is derived from another description of facts. Partridges, to speak of 

 them only, are affirmed to be possessed of a power which, when exer- 

 cised, baffles the sportsman's best dogs and his attendant's most ac- 

 curate marking; but nineteen partridges out of twenty, take the 

 season through, most unquestionably do not avail themselves of it. 

 No doubt every sportsman is often aware he may have left a bird be- 

 hind him, but how many has he found for one he believes he has 

 left ? The succession of points got in September, in a piece of good 

 turnips or potatoes in a well-stocked country, or later still in the 

 coverts afforded by our banks, in a good partridge year, when the 

 young inexperienced partridges are most terrified^ — in other words, in 

 circumstances calling for, and, by the theorists, supposed to originate 

 the exercise of the power of suppression, — is a sufficient reply to any 

 one who has no theory to maintain. Surely if a pursued and alarmed 

 bird could suppress its scent, it would be done by nineteen pursued 

 and alarmed birds out of twenty, instead of by the solitary unit in 

 twenty. Every one who has ever noticed the singular freaks with 

 which colour spreads itself in water, darkening this place, leaving 

 that quite untinged, can easily imagine how there must be analogous 

 freaks, more strange still, in a fluid so much more subtle than water, 

 and with a commingling matter so infinitely less tangible and appre- 

 ciable than colouring matter. On the whole I must say that it does 

 appear to me a most hasty generalization, from very inadequate facts, 

 to assume that a partridge, or other game bird, can suppress its scent, 

 because in a few isolated instances — vert/ few, comparatively — a marked 

 bird cannot be found by the pointer or trod up by the sportsman. 



J. C, Atkinson. 



February 5, 1858. 



XVI. 



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