BLACK-GAME SHOOTING 
Mr Thomas Ranken sends me the following notes on a by-day of this 
nature in the border country, where his singular skill with the rifle 
resulted in a somewhat remarkable total : 
“ I have looked up my game book and And that on October 31 , 1906, 
using a *303 rifle, I shot thirty-nine black-game and nine various on 
Commonside, Linhope, Castle Weary, Caerlanrig and Falnash farms, 
Teviot Head. I killed only one greyhen, and that was an accident. 
So far as I can remember, it was a dampish, misty sort of day, so 
the black-game were not very wild. I had a motor car with me, which I 
left at the farms. All the stalking and shooting was done on the fields 
and grassy knolls; as soon as a pack fairly took to the hill, I hurried 
back to the car and went on to the next farm. There was a lot of 
hard, wet crawling, I remember, and I generally got up within 70 
or 80 yards, though I killed one Blackcock at 180 yards — but, as a 
rule, I don’t like taking long shots with so light a cartridge. I fired 
the first shot a little before nine o’clock, and an hour later was back 
in the car with ten birds out of the first pack, as the result of half a 
dozen short stalks. After that I didn’t succeed in getting fairly on 
terms with another pack until the last hour of the day, when I got 
eleven out of a pack, and four at one stalk. That year, the total for 
the season for our party on Teviot Head was 392 black -game ; best 
day forty, mostly young cocks, as the old cocks did not drive so well 
— ^but my bag on that day was nearly all made up of frosty -whiskered 
old veterans.” 
It is sad to record that in most parts of Scotland black-game are steadily 
decreasing. Nor may we ever hope to see them again in the numbers that 
used to frequent such favoured ground as the Duke of Buccleuch’s estates 
in Dumfries -shire, where in the sixties 1,500 was no unusual total for the 
season, and where on one occasion 247 black-game (of which over 200 were 
cocks), fell to eleven guns in a day’s shooting over the Kirkconnel ground. 
Should Government afforestation of waste lands ever take place on a 
large scale in Scotland, doubtless the black-game would, if countenanced, 
increase abundantly among the young woods, but it is to be feared that 
their presence in any numbers would be wholly inimical to the successful 
conduct of the operations of forestry, so destructive are they to the buds 
of larch and Scotch fir. 
In Dumfries and Galloway alone among Scotch counties, do the black- 
game seem to exist in numbers at all comparable to the records of the 
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