tJPLAND SHOOTING. 
199 
young, if unmolested. If persecuted and shot off, year after 
year, on his very breeding ground, and while he was in the 
very act of breeding, he will desert that ground altogether. 
Of this, I have seen proof positive. In the immediate vicinity ot 
Warwick, in Orange county, within two miles of the village, 
there are twenty little woods and swamps, each of which used ten 
or twelve years ago to be a certain find in July for two, three or 
more broods of birds. It was easy shooting and easy marking 
ground, and year after year I and my party—at that time no 
one else shot in that region—killed off the whole summer stock, 
clean. The consequence was, that long before the general 
shooting of the district was affected by the march of intellect 
and the growth of railroads, and while birds yet abounded a 
mile or two farther off, those swamps ceased even to hold a 
summer brood. Twenty birds killed in a wood, twenty days 
in succession, injure that wood less as a home for Woodcock 
than ten killed once in July. Hence, as for fifty other reasons, 
I say, if we would have Woodcock shooting at all, away with 
summer shooting—away with all upland shooting, antecedent 
to the first of October, unless you choose to except Snipe, 
although for the exception I can see no reason, unless it is that 
the evil produced by killing them in spring is as yet something 
less crying, and the diminution of their numbers less palpable. 
I had the honor to lay a draft of a petition to the New-York 
legislature on this subject, before the New-York Sportsman’s 
Club in the course of last winter—1846-7—which was taken 
up, and the draft printed. I regret to say that, from prudential 
motives, as it was thought by many good sportsmen, and appre¬ 
hension of difficulty in getting a sufficiency of signatures, action 
on it has been pos poned for the present. 
I am still myself satisfied, that the measure therein proposed, 
or some other nearly akin to it, is the last and only hope left to 
sportsmen of preserving any kind of game, but especially 
Woodcock, among us. 
The domestic habits of the Quail, his haunting homesteads, 
and becoming to some degree a pet of the farmer, and yet 
