These remarks are mainly applicable to wild pheasants, as distinguished from those in the preserves, and which are commonly known as fed pheasants. As the season advances, it is a point never to be lost sight of by the sportsman who shoots in large woods, or anywhere except in a good preserve, to note well what is found in the crops of the birds. In the early part of the season he will find them chiefly filled with wheat and barley, peas and beans. When November comes, a variety of food is discovered. As December approaches, a change takes place again; and wortle-berries, acorns, hips and haws, are there. Winter is now at hand, and food hard to come at; but he who caters for the sparrow feedeth all his creatures in due season. Corn there is little or none; but some few remaining hips and haws, berries of the mandrake and English hiccory, and a few acorns and wood-nuts, appear as the food of the pheasants, which no doubt they have toiled hard to find. The practical lessons taught the sportsman by such observations are these: they point out the quarters in which, from noticing what the birds feed upon, he is most likely to find the birds themselves; and those who would excel in all branches of sport, will find more gratification in knowing where and how to beat for game, in seeing the pointers quarter their ground, back and drop to shot, and the spaniels feather along the scent, while the sagacity of the retriever crowns all, than in the mere slaughter itself, whether the quarry be the buck, the hare, the pheasant, the woodcock, snipe, or partridge. Thus, then, by a little thought and observation on the woods and their inhabitants, the true sportsman will never fail to bring home something from any country, however thinly stocked with game; while many a blank day succeeds another with him who, travelling from Dan to Beersheba, would cry, "It is all barren; and so it is, and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruit it offers." Many a day, in early times, have I been staggered to hear my old friends, Robert W- and William H-, tell of what we should find in wood or cornfield before we entered it. "There is a hare in this field." "There are pheasants in this spinny if there are any in the lordship." Enigmas then; but which have found their solution in the fact, that my old friends knew well enough, though I did not, from the field or spinny itself, or the food it contained, what was fairly to be expected in it. The observations made upon the pheasants will apply as well to partridges and woodcocks: particular spots with them, are, independent of food, great favourites year after year beyond all question. There is nothing more cunning than a pheasant in cover, or rather, a ruck of pheasants in a wood. Their nice sense of hearing, and the great celerity with which they run through the wood, affords them so many chances of baffling the sportsman, that he may beat a large wood twice over in which there are pheasants, and fail to find them. I have seen many curious instances of this kind, both where the pheasants were numerous, and again where they were very thinly scattered. Pheasant-shooting in a good preserve is a different thing altogether from the same sport in a wood barely stocked with game. *Sterne. To kill any quantity of pheasants in the former, it is necessary to drive the wood in sections; to plant a line of men or boys as stoppers in one quarter, while the sportsmen, dogs, and beaters, go through another. By this means the pheasants are driven from the high wood into that of lower growth, and ultimately into the young spring, where the battuing follows. Even in these places, and with all appliances of men and dogs to boot, I have known the pheasants outwit the keepers, chiefly by running in long packs and single files, twenty to fifty together, and eventually taking wing, as deer break sewe! at the spot where it was intended to hold them up and commence shooting in earnest. If their instinct or sagacity enables them to secure an advantage over man in places where they are but little disturbed, and fed and fattened somewhat like poultry, it is not to be wondered at, that in large woods, where they roam at will, similar results should very frequently follow. Two or three years ago I was baffled in Royce Wood in this way. I knew there were pheasants in the wood, because I had seen them out at feed repeatedly, towards afternoon, in September and October. I first commenced beating the wood when the leaf was nearly all down, and of course the bottom rather hollow and well adapted for them to run in. I beat this wood day after day; I don't mean consecutively, but during the next month or six weeks; and, although my spaniels were steady, we should soon have parted company had they not been "mute as mackerel," and free from hare and rabbit; and I took infinite pains to come up with the birds they fairly outwitted me. Now and then I heard a hen fly, and one day a cock perched within ten yards of me; and, although in the whole period I bagged a leash of pheasants, I always thought they were stray birds from some of the surrounding woods, and that the ni I was in quest of escaped me altogether; there can, in fact, be no mistake about this, for they were there when the season closed, and seen repeatedly in February and March, when the foxhounds were in the cover. From what I have observed in other woods, I can account for this result in various ways. I know that the cocks will run much more than the hens, and, when they fly, that they seldom show themselves so plainly, or rise so high through the trees-that the pheasants will run before the dogs, and then perch on the lower boughs and underwood, while the former quest around for them in vainthat they will skulk until you are even with or pass them, and then run back into the beaten ground--that they will leave the cover when a spaniel opens, a jay cries, or when the hares begin to gallop off, or the wood-pigeons to leave the trees, as soon as one commences beating but it was very strange that, day after day, the same result should have followed, and that in the long run I should by no chance have got well amongst them. There is another peculiarity about pheasants, or of the woods in which they are found: it often happens that pheasants bred in one cover go to another to feed. This is readily accounted for by the foregoing observations upon their food and water at different periods, to say nothing of the quarter from which a strong wind may blow for three or four days together. No sooner, therefore, do they hear any one approach through the feeding ground than they make off to the wood where they were bred, and which their instinct teaches them is a place of greater safety. Having shot very much with the farmers some years since-and no men know the habits and haunts of game better-I have never forgotten the remarks which I heard an excellent sportsman make to his brother, when beating Oxey Wood, at Christmas, 1837: or the "Let us begin on this side the wood, William," said he, old cocks will cry Home it!' and all the pheasants will be off to Royce Wood before you can say 'Jack Robinson."" I asked him if he knew why it was so, and he answered ،، No, he really did not; but it was always so. If they went out to make a bag for Christmas, the pheasants were sure to beat them, unless they began on the east side of the cover.' The reason became plain enough to me as I became a more close observer of the habits and instincts of the birds, although my friend John C-spoke only the words, which in many a sportsman's mouth may very well rank as part of that every-day commodity called "fool's wisdom." Independently of this propensity to "home it" (as the phrase went, aptly enough) and leave the wood, the pheasants always fly to the high wood, or old sale, as it is termed in some localities. No one, therefore, who expects sport, and beats for his own game instead of relying upon servants to find it for him, should flinch going through the high wood, although he can hardly hope to kill much in it; but, by driving it with whoop and holloa, whistle, a shot now and then at hares and rabbits, and a wild dog or two, if he has the means of taking them up when he approaches the young springs-if there are pheasants in the wood, he is using the surest and best mode to get at them. Speaking of wild dogs, it is my intention to offer a few remarks upon dogs in cover, and then to shut up my desk. I think, after all, there is no dog equal to a mute spaniel in cover, if he is free from hare and rabbit-I mean, not given to chasing them. Noisy dogs serve only to set the pheasants a running, and, although they may assist in the death of a hare or rabbit, I have a strong opinion that they are the means of many a pheasant and woodcock stealing away unseen. It is from the noise and chasing of spaniels that many gentlemen have adopted men as beaters, or have selected setters and even pointers in beating their covers. I never liked the system of beaters. It is hard enough to persuade yourself that pheasants-fed, counted, and watched like fowls-are the natural denizens of wood and forest; but this notion is sorely invaded by men with sticks in their hands, thrashing the trees and briars to drive the poor animals up for a shot. Nor can I make up my mind for the adoption of dogs in covert, that are meant by nature for the open country, and the destruction of the birds which are its proper inhabitants. Neither the one nor the other come up to the proper standard in my opinion. It is like fox-hunting with greyhounds, by whom poor pug is now and then pulled down in view; or the motley pack which the gamekeeper occasionally assembles around him when he sallies forth with the farmers and labourers "to thin down the rabbits" at the command of the steward, or the huntsman when the foxes have been ringing and loath to leave their larder. All these seem out of place-unnatural means to the end "The things we see are neither rich nor rare, But wonder how the devil they got there." From my fondness for spaniels, the infinite pains I have taken in the breeding and breaking, and the pounds it has cost me to possess my present little pack-to say nothing of the idea of fair sporting, which is all in all with a true lover of the trigger-I should be sorry to beat for pheasants with any other dogs; but the spaniels must be mute. Some prefer them all of one colour; lemon and white, liver and white, or black and white. There is one thing to be said in favour of mixed colours, and it is this, if they are all of a colour, and you have three or four couple in cover, one, or even two, may be on a scent and not noticed; while it is, in a manner, impossible that a brown and white dog, or a black and white bitch, can be out of sight for a minute and not missed, amongst a variety of coats. If missed, one is prepared for a shot, otherwise away goes hare, pheasant, or cock without one. I own they look more sporting-like all of a colour. The late Lord Westmorland, one of the best and keenest shots in his day, had all his spaniels lemon and white; but where every shot is an object, what I have said upon colour is worth notice. It is a little "fool's wisdom"-experience-that will teach this lesson. During the first fortnight of the present partridge season, owing to the dry, hard ground, there was little or no scent for the pointers and setters, and I found my steady spaniels invaluable, and got several fair days with them when the other dogs ran up more by far than they found; for in many cases where men shot to pointers the birds found the dogs, not the dogs the birds. I saw how things were going, and the complaints of many a brother sportsman confirmed my opinion that the pointers were almost useless, and that it was in a manner 66 necessary to walk them up" if any sport was had with partridges, so I sallied forth with Rover, Flush, Flirt, and Dash, and by riding over the stubbles on my old pony, and thus driving the birds into turnips, quick-lines, or other cover, I had very pretty shooting indeed. But to return to the pheasants. Having stated how they have occasionally baffled both others and myself, and escaped our best efforts to get at them, and after the observations I have made on their food, their finding-grounds, and habits, both in the preserves and woods and covers, open I will add in con clusion, that for many a season in shooting where others shoot ad libitum, and where the game is anything but plentiful, I have, with my mute and quiet dogs, not once or twice, but repeatedly, season after season, on comparing notes with my brother sportsmen, found that I had had the lion's share of the woods. Verbum sat. September, 1844. THE LAMENT OF MRS. TABITHA GRIZZLE. Oh dear! oh dear! that I should leave With nought to do but on these sands 'Tis always so when autumn comes, My husband leaves me all day long; My daughters drag me on the beach, They promised when they brought us here, Their pleasures we should share; But now all day they ride away, They go out early, come home late, It was but yesterday we asked, "Upon my word," said John and sons, "To-day we all meet at Splash Farm, "On Thursday, at the varmint's tail |