THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
“ Do not burn against the wind, as it will burn slow and you are wasting 
time. As a rule you will not have many fine days during the burning season 
to waste. 
“ Heather burning lamps are very useful, as you can light your fire 
twenty yards wide, and if you do that you will be able to start flogging 
it out when it has burnt about fifteen to twenty yards. 
“It is not advisable to let the leading fire get too far in front of 
you, for, supposing it was eighty yards in front, and the wind suddenly 
changed, you would have a very large fire, which might get the better 
of you. 
“ The lamps are very useful where the ground is broken, and for 
burning out gullies. 
“ Always burn all covert sixty yards in front, and eighty yards behind, 
the butts : it makes it so much easier to pick up game after a drive. 
“ If you have been burning from north to south, and the next day or so 
the wind changes to east or west, you will be able to put some fires through 
from one burn to another, so that the heather will be left in square patches. 
At the end of a burn you can sometimes save a little of the old heather, 
say about three or four yards, which will come in useful for the grouse to 
nest in.” 
It is also a good plan on a driving moor to leave a certain amount 
of old heather half a mile in front of the line of butts for the packs to 
collect in. 
The great point to aim at in heather -burning is eventually to have all 
your ground covered with heather — in no case more than fifteen or six- 
teen years old — and to bring it into a regular rotation of crop. 
The grouse will then be provided with as much good food as the ground 
will carry. There will be no useless land ; and in the hard weather which 
generally comes in January, February, March, April and May, there will 
be a sufficiency of food to keep the breeding stock of grouse in good health, 
and enable them to withstand the attacks of strongyles. 
It is the thick bushy heather of ten to fifteen years old that still carries 
succulent shoots half way down the stem in the late winter and early 
spring. 
By careful and sufficient burning, large numbers of the strongyle larvae 
and many millions of that destructive beetle Lochmoea suturalis^ Thomson, 
which has destroyed thousands of acres of good heather in Ayrshire 
and other counties of Scotland, will be cleared off the ground. There is 
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