62 
graham’s magazine. 
cult to conceive that persons should have taken the trouble 
of preserving so stupid and uninteresting a bird as the 
woodcock in a cage, unless for the purpose of transport¬ 
ing them from one country to another in order to the intro¬ 
duction of new species. 
This might be done very easily with regard to some spe¬ 
cies, and with undoubted success; and it has greatly sur¬ 
prised me that it has never been attempted with regard to 
our American woodcock, which might unquestionably be 
naturalized in England with the greatest facility; where 
it would, I have no doubt, multiply extraordinarily, and 
become one of the most numerous and valuable species of 
game, as the mildness of the winters in ordinary seasons 
would permit the bird to remain perennially in the island, 
without resorting to migration in order to obtain food. 
The woodcock and snipe can both be very readily do¬ 
mesticated, and can be easily induced to feed on bread and 
milk reduced to the consistency of pulp, of which they 
ultimately become extremely fond. This is done at first 
by throwing a few small red worms into the bread and 
milk, for which the birds bore and bill, as if it were in 
their natural muddy soil. 
In all countries in which any species of the woodcock 
is found, it is a bird essentially of moderate climates, ab¬ 
horring and shunning all extremes of temperature, whether 
of heat or of cold. 
With us, it winters in the Southern States from Vir¬ 
ginia, in parts of which, I believe, it is found at all sea¬ 
sons of the year, through the Carolinas, Georgia and Flo¬ 
rida to Louisiana and Mississippi, in the almost impene¬ 
trable cane-brakes and deep morasses of which it finds a 
secure retreat and abundance of its favorite food, during 
the inclement season, which binds up every stream and 
boggy swamp of the Middle and New England States in 
icy fetters. 
So soon, however, as the first indications of spring com¬ 
mence, in those regions of almost tropical heat, the wood¬ 
cock wings its way with the unerring certainty of instinct 
which guides him back, as surely as the magnet points to 
the pole, to the very wood and the very brake of the wood 
in which he was hatched, and commences the duties of 
nidification. 
I am inclined to believe that the woodcock are already 
paired when they come on to the northward ; if not, they 
do so without the slightest delay, for they unquestionably 
begin to lay within a week or two after their arrival, 
sometimes even before the snow has melted from the up- 
1 ,nd. Sometimes they have been known to lay so early 
as February, but March and the beginning of April are 
their more general season. Their nest is very in irtificiolly 
made of dry leaves and stalks of grass. The female lays 
from four to five eggs, about an inch and a half long, by 
an inch in diameter, of a dull clay color, marked with a 
few blotches of dark brown interspersed with splashes of 
faint purple. It is a little doubtful whether the wood¬ 
cock does or does not rear a second brood of young, un¬ 
less the first hatching is destroyed, as is very frequently 
the case, by spring floods, which are very fatal to them. 
In this case, they do unquestionably breed a second time, 
for I have myself found the young birds, skulking about 
like young mice in the long grass, unable to fly, and 
covered with short blackish down, the most uncouth and 
comical-looking little wretches imaginable, during early 
July shooting; but it is on the whole my opinion that, at 
least on early seasons, they generally raise two broods; 
and this, among others, is one cause of my very strong de¬ 
sire to see summer woodcock shooting entirely abolished. 
Unless this is done, I am convinced beyond doubt, that 
before twenty years have elapsed the woodcock will be 
as rare an animal as a wolf between the great lakes and 
the Atlantic sea-board, so ruthlessly are they persecuted 
and hunted down by pot-hunters and poachers, for the 
benefit of restaurateurs and of the lazy, greedy cockneys 
who support them. There is, however, I fear little hope 
of any legislative enactment toward this highly desirable 
end; for too many even of those who call themselves, and 
who ought to be, true sportsmen, are selfish and obstinate 
on this point, and the name of the pot-hunters is veritably 
legion. Moreover, it is to be doubted whether, even if 
such a statute were added to our game-laws, it could be 
enforced ; so vehemently opposed do all the rural classes, 
who ought to be the best friends of the game, show them¬ 
selves on all occasions to any attempt toward preserving 
them, partly from a mistaken idea that game-laws are of 
feudal origin and of aristocratic tendency; and so averse 
are they to enforce the penalties of the law on offenders, 
from a servile apprehension of giving offense to their 
neighbors. 
At present, in almost all the States of which the wood¬ 
cock is a summer visitant, either by law or by prescrip¬ 
tion July is the month appropriated to the commencement 
of their slaughter; in New York the first is the day, in 
New Jersey the fifth, and in all the Middle States, with 
the single exception of Delaware, where it is deferred 
until August, some day of the same month is fixed as the 
termination of close time. Even in Delaware the excep¬ 
tion is rendered nugatory, by a provision permitting every 
person to shoot on his own grounds, whether in or out 
of season, in consequence of which the birds are all killed 
off early in June. 
It may now be set down almost as a rule, that in all the 
Atlantic seaboard counties, and, indeed, everywhere in 
the vicinity of the large cities and great thoroughfares, the 
whole of the summer hatching is killed off before the end 
of July, with the exception of a few scattered stragglers, 
which have escaped pursuit in some impenetrable brake or 
oozy quagmire which defies the foot of the sportsman; 
that few survive to moult, and that the diminished num¬ 
bers, which we now find on our autumn shooting-grounds, 
are supplied exclusively by the northern and Canadian 
broods, which keep successively flying before the advanc¬ 
ing cold of winter, and sojourning among us for a longer 
or a shorter period, ere they wing their way to the rice- 
fields of the Savannah, or the cane-brakes of the Mis¬ 
sissippi. 
If my method could be generally adopted, of letting the 
fifteenth day of September, after the moulting season is 
passed, and when the birds are beginning again to congre¬ 
gate on their favorite feeding-grounds, be-the commence¬ 
ment of every sort of upland shooting, without any excep¬ 
tion, the sport would be enormous; the birds at that season 
arc in full vigor, in complete plumage, in the perfection of 
condition for the table, and are so strong on the wing, so 
active and so swift, that no one could for a moment ima¬ 
gine them to be the same with the miserable, puny, half- 
fledged younglings, which any bungling boy can butcher 
as he pleases, with the most miserable apparatus, and 
without almost as well as with a dog, during the dog- 
days of July. 
The weather is, moreover, cool and pleasant, and in 
every way well-suited to the sport at this season; dogs 
have a chance to do their work handsomely and well, and 
the sportsman can do his work, too, as he ought to do it, 
like a man, walking at his proper rate, unmolested by mos¬ 
quitoes, and without feeling the salt perspiration stream¬ 
ing into his eyes, until he can hardly brook the pain. 
But no such hope existing as that state legislatures, de¬ 
pendent, not on rational but on brute opinion, should con¬ 
descend to hear or listen to common sense, on matters such 
as game l aws, are we, or are we not, to abandon our plan, 
