UPLAND SHOOTING. 
211 
and, with the sole exception that it is entirely useless to look 
for him in coppices, or along springy woodsides, as I have re¬ 
commended in wild weather in spring, his haunts and habits 
are precisely the same. 
He is more settled, not being now hurried in point of time, 
or busied about the pleasures of courtship, or the cares of nidi- 
fication. He lies harder before the dog, does not fly so far 
when flushed, and feels little or no inclination to ramble about, 
but adheres steadily to one feeding ground, unless driven away 
from it by persecution, until the hard frosts of winter compel 
him to betake himself to the rice-fields of Georgia, and the 
muddy margins of the warm savannah. 
Moreover, the weather itself being at this time steadier, and 
less mutable, the birds are much less often forced to move from 
one part of the country to another, by the fitness or unfitness of 
the ground. In spring one year the meadows are too wet, and 
another perhaps too dry,—both conditions being at times car¬ 
ried to such an excess, as to drive the birds off altogether, from 
the impossibility of feeding or lying comfortably. In the autumn 
this is rarely, if ever, the case ; and although autumn shooting 
is, of course, in some degree variable—Snipe being more abun¬ 
dant one year than another—it never has occurred, within my 
observation, that the flight passes on altogether without pausing, 
or giving some chance of sport, more or less, as is not very un¬ 
usually the consequence of a series of droughts or rains in the 
spring. 
The Woodcock, on his return from the northward, or his des¬ 
cent from the mountain-tops, never, as a general rule, returns 
precisely to the same feeding grounds which he prefers in sum ¬ 
mer, during the extreme heats, but appears to prefer dry hill¬ 
sides, sloping to the sun, southerly or westward, and to choose 
woods of young saplings, or sprouts, as they are commonly 
called in this country, tall, wet maple groves, and second 
growth of oak, adjacent to brook or meadow feeding grounds, 
rather than the dense coppice, and that variety of brakes and in¬ 
tervales, or glades, which he loves the best in July. Thispecu- 
