64 
CmCUSISPECTION REQUIRED. 
■u'iiiter that they are liable to these modes of destriictlon, 
as they are then less wild and wary than at other times, 
and, especially when the snow is on the ground, pack to- 
gether in considerable numbers, seeking the shelter of the 
turf-stack, wall, or bank, or any other object which rises 
above the surrounding level. This may partly account 
for the circumstance that the London markets are generally 
well supplied with these birds up to about the middle of 
March. It has been said that in some districts of Scot- 
land the landowners make more by their Grouse than by 
any other produce ; and we can well believe it, for the 
lands where these birds are most plentiful, are barren and 
heathy. 
To those who are about to ' rent a shooting,' we would, with 
' Craven,' recommend circumspection. Not always are the 
crops so plentiful as they are represented, and the renter 
may find himself in the case of the individual immortalised 
by Joe Miller, who purchased an estate warranted to con- 
tain a * hanging wood,' and found only a gibbet thereon. 
* We imagine,' says the author of Recreations in Shoot- 
ing^ * that a good many who have taken Highland quarters 
on the assurance that they would furnish red game, have 
discovered that the supply was chiefly confined to the 
carrotty gillies, who go with the gTound in the capacity of 
markers — Ulcus a non hicendo.^ Old sportsmen can re- 
member the time when the Red Grouse was by no means 
scarce in many of the English coimties ; in none of them 
now can it be called plentiful, although it was but a few 
years since that forty- three brace w^ere shot by a keeper on 
the Yorkshire moors before two o'clock in the afternoon 
of the 12th of August. Stafibrdshire and Derbyshire are 
now probably the southern limits of its range, and from 
these counties it is being gradually driven by the advance 
of cultivation, before which it invariably retires. A consider- 
able extent of open mountain and heathery moorland seems 
necessary to its existen ce. It loves not woods of birch and reedy 
swamps, like the Blackcock ; nor dark pine forests, like the 
Capercailzie ; and altliough it does not retire so fixr from the 
ways of men as its near relative the Ptarmigan, which 
•haunts the higher Alpine regions, yet must it have ' ample 
