File:Game birds and shooting-sketches - illustrating the habits, modes of capture, stages of plumage and the hybirds and varieties which occur amongst them (1894) (14563320687).jpg

Identifier: gamebirdsshootin00mill (find matches)
Title: Game birds and shooting-sketches : illustrating the habits, modes of capture, stages of plumage and the hybirds & varieties which occur amongst them
Year: 1894 (1890s)
Authors: Millais, John Guille, 1865-1931
Subjects: Grouse Game and game-birds Hunting
Publisher: London : H. Sotheran
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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be very damaging, when a small bird like a Grouse,weighing a little less than two pounds, is sufticient to stuna man or knock him head over heels. (There was anaccount in a sporting paper lately of a man who had beenknocked over whilst the bird spitted itself two feet downthe barrel of his gun.) At any rate, some very nearshaves are seen at times of shooters being struck by them,and I should be sorry to be the one on whom suchretribution falls. At the commencement and during stormy weather.Capers are very unsettled and are constantly on the wing.This applies more to the birds in the higher ridges andopen larch-woods ; and should the gale be of any duration,they will resort to the thick cover on the low grounds,even though they have to travel considerable distances tosuch places. During the last week of November 1888 afriend of mine, who was most anxious to shoot a brace ofCapers, went to Murthly, to try and procure them, which,under ordinary circumstances, would have been a certainty,
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CAPERCAILLIE 19 as lie was a good shot and a keen one to boot. However,as l)ad luck would have it, the woods seemed almostdestitute of birds, and the few shots he did get were hard,so he failed to score, and the next day he left, much dis-appointed at his ill success, as one does not get Caper-shooting every day. All that night, however, and thenext two davs a fearful storm of wind and snow rasfed,after which I took my friend up from Glasgow again totry his luck once more. We were met next morningby James Keay (our old keeper and the most genial andgood-natured creature ever created), who gave us thepleasing intelligence that on the previous day, when look-ing for a w^ounded Eoe, he had found the Capers in oneor two thick parts of the woods fciirly swarming. The day was unusually calm and still, as is usual aftera gale, wliich no doul)t accounted for our seeing but veryfew birds until the afternoon, for they had probablyavailed themselves at once of the opportunity to returnhome now t

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