178 
FRANK FORESTER’S FIELD SPORTS. 
plain, covered with rich, tender grass, and interspersed at every 
few paces with brakes of alders, and willow bushes. The num¬ 
bers I have seen, on that ground, are incredible. In 1839 I shot 
over it, accompanied by my friend, Mr. Ward, of Warwick, who 
then weighed above three hundred pounds, and shot with a 
single-barrelled Westley Richard’s gun; and, in three succes¬ 
sive days, we bagged fifty-seven, seventy-nine and ninety-eight 
Cock, over a single brace of dogs, not beginning to shoot until 
it was late in the morning. On the following year, with a 
friend from New-York, I shot on the same ground all day the 
first, and until noon on the second; bagging, on the first, one 
hundred and twenty-five birds, and, on the second morning, 
seventy. The first of these days was intensely hot; and the 
ground became so much foiled by running of the innumerable 
birds, that, although we had excellent retrievers, we lost, 
beyond doubt, forty or fifty birds ; and at four in the afternoon 
we were entirely out of ammunition. 
I am perfectly satisfied that, if we had been provided with a 
brace of fresh dogs, at noon, with clean guns, and a proper sup¬ 
ply of powder and copper caps, both of which gave out, it 
would have been perfectly easy, on that day to have bagged 
from one hundred, to one hundred and fifty couple of Wood 
cock. 
The shooting on that ground is now ended. The Erie rail¬ 
road passes within ten miles of it, and it is now overrun with 
city poachers and pot-hunters; besides being shot incessantly 
by the farmers’ boys and village idlers of the neighborhood, 
who have begun to compete with the New York vagabonds in 
supplying the markets with game. 
I confess that I have often wondered that the owners of these 
tracts have not had the shrewdness to discover that by enforcing 
the laws, and profiting trespassers, they might annually let the 
shooting of these ranges for very considerable sums. “ The 
Drowned Lands ” are in general held in large farms, and the best 
shooting is all owned, comparatively speaking, by a very few 
individuals. I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that 
