THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
charming as viewed from aboard a gunning -punt passing over it — is utterly 
lost as the tide recedes. Then all lies in recumbent masses, unseemly, and 
almost repellent, on its oozy bed. The only marine plant that I have then 
noticed to maintain an erect attitude is the marsh -samphire {Salicornea 
herbaced)^ in form not unlike an equisetum. Its range, however, is re- 
stricted to very shallow waters, next the shore, where the sweep of the 
tide is hardly felt.* 
It follows that denizens of such bare and shelterless levels must neces- 
sarily discard all attempt to seek safety by concealment. Obviously they 
enjoy no opportunity to conceal themselves; and the effects of such environ- 
ment, operating during ages, have long eliminated any such ideas or 
desires from their natures. Wildfowl despise alike concealment, colour- 
protection and all the other safeguards that feebler creatures seek, or are 
said to seek. They rely for their safety exclusively upon their own powers 
and upon their alert senses of sight, scent, and hearing — senses which, 
during centuries of enforced usage, have been developed to a degree of 
perfection that few, very few save wildfowlers, have ever adequately 
realized. Watch them as they sit out there, a sonorous crowd, in the midst 
of verdant ooze that spreads away for leagues — to the limits of human 
vision — ^wildfowl verily seem of set purpose to defy human power, to 
challenge us and all our devices. 
Wildfowl present an unanswerable negative to fantastic theories about 
“ universal colour-protection ” in birds, of which so much has been 
recently heard. None who have had opportunity to watch the long lines 
of brent geese gaggling and guzzling on the ebb -swept ooze ; the hordes 
of whistling wigeon, or pintails in their thousands — all alike conspicuous 
both to eye and ear so far as our human senses will avail — none could 
see such sights and ever again dream such dreams. 
So conspicuous are wildfowl that, as I mentioned in my “Art of Wild- 
fowling ’’ (p. 172), the species of mallards or other game-ducks can be 
clearly distinguished from geese with a good telescope at a distance of 
about three miles. 
Colour -protection finds no more place in their scheme of self-defence 
than does concealment. Many wildfowl are most conspicuously coloured. 
Their clean-cut contrasts of bright opposing hues appear actually aggres- 
sive — witness the pintails and wigeon drakes, sheld -ducks, eider and 
* In depicting wildfowl, artists often yield to temptation (very natural) in adding a background of bush, or rush, or 
sedge, or rocks— which, though it enhances the beauty of the drawing, is often incongruous, and conveys a false 
idea of the haunts and environment of many of the birds. 
394 
