. Bird-life of the borders, records of wild sport and natural history on moorland and sea. Birds -- Great Britain. 220 BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS. shooters. There is no assignable reason for their with- drawal, but whatever the cause may be, the fact remains that at the present day the Pochard is now all but unknown. A chance straggler may now and then turn up in August, or while on migration, and a few years back I heard of two or three being obtained by flight-shooters in winter, but I have only once myself met with this duck on the coast. This was in January, during severe frost. It form
. Bird-life of the borders, records of wild sport and natural history on moorland and sea. Birds -- Great Britain. 220 BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS. shooters. There is no assignable reason for their with- drawal, but whatever the cause may be, the fact remains that at the present day the Pochard is now all but unknown. A chance straggler may now and then turn up in August, or while on migration, and a few years back I heard of two or three being obtained by flight-shooters in winter, but I have only once myself met with this duck on the coast. This was in January, during severe frost. It formed one of a little bunch of about a dozen ducks which were sitting on the point of a sandspit. AYe were in the act of " setting up " to them, when another gunner, concealed from our view by an intervening sand-bank, fired and killed six of them. Five were Scaups, and the sixth a Pochard in immature ME1{(;A^â ^^ER DRAKE, showing fomi and carriage of Crest. The Tufted Duck I have never met with on the north- east coast. Another interesting and beautiful member of the duck genus which the wildfowler sees almost daily when afloat, is the Eed-breasted Merganser. Exquisitely graceful in form and plumage, it is yet so wholly useless when killed, that no professional fowler would waste a charge of powder and shot over them. The ^lergansers are, nevertheless, the most timid, wild, and utterly inaccessible of all the wild birds of the sea. So keen and alert is their vision, and so hateful the human race, that they will not, wittingly, allow the presence of a punt on the same square mile of sea as them-. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced for readability - coloration and appearance of these illustrations may not perfectly resemble the original Chapman, Abel, 1851-1929. London : Gurney and Jackson
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookpublisherlondo, bookyear1889
