DUCK-SHOOTING. 
375 
towards the unsuspecting birds, and when within arm’s length, 
catches one of them by the leg, and twitches it suddenly 
under water, before it has time to alarm the rest, by crying 
or fluttering its wings. He then moves towards another, 
which he treats in the same way, and so on, till he has col- 
lected as many as he can conveniently carry, attached to a 
belt round his middle, and then he slowly retires, leaving 
the floating calabashes amongst the Ducks. On another 
part of the coast the same expedient is practised, excepting 
that instead of a calabash, they use a sort of cap made of 
rushes, similar caps being left to float amongst the flocks of 
Ducks, to which they soon get as much accustomed as those 
we first mentioned do to the calabashes. 
The Sheldrakes, which, as we have seen, build in rabbit- 
burrows, are caught by snares placed before the hole, into 
which the birds are traced by the marks of their feet on the 
sand. In this country, our markets are supplied either by 
those who are in the habit of shooting them, as a livelihood 
during the Winter season, or from decoys, in which by far 
the greater number are taken. In shooting, the great diffi- 
culty is to get within gunshot, the Duck not only being very 
watchful and timid, but possessed of so fine a sense of 
smelling, that hut for the precaution of approaching them to 
leeward, or of holding a piece of smoking turf in the hand, 
it is no easy matter to get within reasonable distance. The 
guns, also, which are employed for this purpose, are much 
longer than those in common use, and will kill at a much 
greater distance. A Duck-shooter’s life is often exposed to 
great hazard ; the sport, if so it may he called, being carried 
on usually in Winter, late in the evening, or early in the 
morning, and most frequently in wet and marshy places, or 
on the shores of wild and solitary estuaries, opening through 
the lowlands near the sea. On these occasions some of them 
prefer going without even a dog, the cold being often so 
severe that no animal could hear it. 
Many of the favourite feeding-places consist of those 
vast muddy flats, covered with green sea-w r eed, over which 
