Waiting for wild duck coming into the “spring” on a frosty night is cold work, but very good fun.  They breed here in fair numbers, and fly away in August.  But when the ground becomes “scrumpety,” as the natives say, with the first severe frost, back they come from the frozen meres to their old home; and if one can keep out of sight (and this is no easy matter in December) many a shot can be obtained in the withybeds by the river.  Teal and widgeon may be shot occasionally in the same manner.

Sometimes, when you are upon the hills with Tom Peregrine, the keeper, trying to pick up a brace or two of partridges for the house, he will suddenly say, “Quad down!” then, throwing himself on to his hands and knees in breathless anxiety, he will begin whistling for “all he knows.”  You imitate him to the best of your ability, and soon, if you are lucky, an enormous flock of golden plover flash over you.  Four barrels are fired almost instantaneously, and the deadly “twelve-bore” of your companion is seldom fired in vain.

Green plover, or lapwings, are numerous enough on the Cotswolds.  They are wonderfully difficult to circumvent, nevertheless.  You crouch down under a wall, while your men go ever so far round to drive them to you; but it is the rarest thing in the world to bag one.  Their eggs are very difficult to find in the breeding season.  It is the male bird that, like a terrified and anxious mother, flies round and round you with piteous cries; the female bird, when disturbed, flies straight away.

Pigeon-shooting with decoys is a very favourite amusement among the Cotswold farmers.  They manage to bag an enormous quantity in a hard winter, sometimes getting over a hundred in a day.  Wood-pigeons come in thousands to the stubble fields when the beech nuts have come to an end.  Large flocks of them annually migrate to England from Northern Europe.  Crouching in a hedge or under a wall, you may enjoy as pretty a day’s sport as ever fell to the lot of mortal man.  A few dead birds are placed on the stubble to attract the flocks, and a grand variety of flying shots may be obtained as the wood-pigeons fly over.  The year 1897 was remarkable for this shooting.  Between November 20th and 30th two of our farmers killed close on a thousand of these birds.  Some of them doubtless were potted on the ground.  Tom Peregrine remarked that “he never saw such a sight of dead pigeons.  The cheese-room up at the farm was full of them.”  The vast flocks that blacken the skies for a few short weeks in November disappear as suddenly as they come.  After November they are no more seen.

There would be many more partridges were it not for the rooks and magpies.  Hedges wherein the birds can hide their nests are few and far between in the wall country, so the keen-eyed rook spies out many a nest in the spring of the year.  For this reason and because they eat the corn, the farmers hate them.  We cannot share their feelings.  We should be sorry to see the old rookery in the garden diminished in the slightest degree.  Jays and magpies are terribly numerous; they are rare egg-stealers.  We have seen as many as twelve of the latter lately flying all together.  Magpies are difficult to get at; they will sit perched upon the topmost twigs of the trees, but will invariably fly away before you get within shot.