Birds. 



6263 



all probabilit}^, multitudes of young birds perished both last year 

 and this. 



I have seen grouse tower, and frequently. Still there seems to be 

 a material difference between the grouse and the partridge in this 

 respect, — a difference including two main particulars, viz., that they 

 lower much less frequently, or, to express my meaning in a more 

 exact manner, a much smaller proportion of the total birds killed 

 towers, and that those that do tower do not rise to anything like the 

 same height as the partridge. I have seen the latter bird often go up 

 seventy or eighty or even a hundred yards, and sometimes appa- 

 rently even much higher than that. I never saw a grouse, however, 

 rise higher than, I should say, thirty or thirty-five yards. Again, I 

 hardly ever saw ten brace of partridges killed without seeing some of 

 them tower, and not very un frequently I have seen both the birds 

 killed by the successive discharge of the two barrels perform the evo- 

 lution in question. On the other hand, I have often seen twelve or 

 fifteen brace of grouse killed, and not observed a towering bird among 

 them. This I cannot help looking upon as remarkable, as the birds 

 of the two species are shot at under precisely similar circumstances : 

 both rise from the ground, both fly at much the same general eleva- 

 tion above the ground, and in much the same sort of way ; and it 

 seems very difficult to account for the discrepancy observable between 

 them in this particular. In the case of rooks, shot, as they usually 

 are, with the gun almost vertical, I am not surprised that towering 

 rarely occurs, or in the case of other birds fired at w^hen flying so as 

 to cause the gun pointed at them to have anything but a horizontal 

 direction j for I feel convinced that towering is occasioned by an 

 injury in some part, wherever that part may be, which can be but 

 rarely reached by shot fired from much below the level at which the 

 bird is flying. I once " towered" a partridge which was shot just as 

 it passed over my head from behind ; but it was so near to me that 

 some of the pellets must necessarily have been driven with force suffi- 

 cient to make them pass quite through the most solid parts of the 

 bird's body. 



One other peculiarity I have often noticed in the wounded grouse, 

 viz., that it falls as if shot dead, or at all events so severely that death 

 shall ensue almost immediately ; and yet, after lying, perhaps quite 

 motionless, during the whole time occupied in recharging, on your 

 approaching to "bag" them they will get up and fly away as if 

 nothing had happened. Once, last season, a bird dropped to my 

 gun. As it did not remain motionless, but continued to work its way 



