The sportsman's handbook to practical collecting, preserving, and artistic setting-up of trophies and specimens : to which is added a synoptical guide to the hunting grounds of the world / by Rowland Ward.

  • Ward, Rowland, 1848?-1912.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The sportsman's handbook to practical collecting, preserving, and artistic setting-up of trophies and specimens : to which is added a synoptical guide to the hunting grounds of the world / by Rowland Ward. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/150
    of all sizes, or tlie destruction of them rather. It will be found, however, that the ordinary gin, of whatever size it may be made, remains the really most efficacious of all such contrivances. The employment of dummies and decoys for birds, and especially for shore-birds, is interesting and useful. Probably in all parts of the world ingenuity can adapt this resource in degree. As a rule gregarious birds are those most subject to the fascination, for such it is. To give examples in our own country—wood-pigeons can be attracted thus : Any carpenter can make the shape of a wood-pigeon in rough; no legs need be shaped, but a stick should project from the lower part of the breast, so that the dummy can be fixed on the ground, or placed in a tree, as may be required; this figure must be painted in colour to represent the pigeon, and the paint must be “ flatted,that is, not glossy. It is astonishing how the wild birds will come down to their haunts when they see this dummy there to assure them. In like manner plovers, gulls, and similar shore-birds may be decoyed. The decoy-duck is made buoyant to rest on the water, and is well known. Verisimilitude in regard to action is a great gain sometimes with theselast-named, and is more important than mere details of feather. The following may be adduced as an instance of this : I once employed a decoy to deceive some sporting companions. They were looking for a shot in the evening twilight, and I provided one for them by hastily making a dab-chick of a bung, two wine-corks, and some wire. This rude image would float upright when ballasted with a stone at the end of a string; to this string I attached a live roach, and set the whole afloat under his guidance down the edge of some tempting reeds. The progress and occasional plunging