The Coot
This is an excellent bird where it is found in great numbers, but is only fitted to give much sport by driving. It rises slowly, but is fast when on the wing, flies high, and takes a great deal of killing. Colonel Hawker quite rightly advised those who would have wild fowl to preserve their coots and not to keep tame swans. Wild fowl fancy themselves secure in the presence of coots, which are most wakeful when the duck by day are much disposed to sleep. Gallinula chloropus, the moorhen, gives no sport, but is good training for retrievers. Linnæus gave the title Fulica atra to the coot. It lays from 7 to 10 eggs.
The Widgeon, or the Whew Bird
This bird breeds seldom in Scotland and Ireland, but large quantities come from abroad in the hard weather; they are the principal attraction of the punt gunner, and afford the chief profit of the decoy man. The way to find widgeon is to discover their chief food, the Zostera marina of the mud flats, and then wait for hard weather and the night, when they feed. Mareca penelopes is its scientific name.
Wild Geese
The grey-lag is the handsomest of these, and the only one that breeds in Britain, and there only in the extreme north of Scotland. It goes South early, and affords little or no winter shooting in this country. In the early autumn some flight shooting and stalking are to be had in its breeding homes.
The Pink-footed Goose
This is the principal of the grey geese to afford sport; it is this species that gives such a great deal of shooting on the north Norfolk coast, but it is not found in Ireland, which is famed in winter for its black geese—the locally miscalled bernicle, i.e. the brent goose, which, if not now found in thousands of acres, as described in Wild Sports of the West, are still migrants in their hundreds of thousands.
The brent goose is entirely a marine feeder, and is consequently, along with the widgeon, the great game of the punt gunner. There are many other varieties of geese, both migrants and introductions, like the Canada goose, but they count for very little in sport in this country, whereas in Egypt, on the Nile, wonderful sport has been had with Egyptian geese, and there is a regular harvest for Canada geese in America, where as many as 200 flighting birds have been shot in a day by one gunner. The beginner in punt gunning cannot do better than buy a second-hand gun and punt, and learn from them what he really wants, which will never be quite the same for any two men. Much depends upon the man himself, whether he intends to have assistance, and whether he has also a yacht to carry him and his punt and guns abroad. As many people have started this sport who have not gone on with it, probably advertising for the outfit would be a certain way of obtaining it at small cost, even if the gun-shops were drawn blank, which is not likely at any time. To be a punt gunner, one has to place oneself at the call of the wind, at the mercy of the wave, and to become the plaything of the tide. But then revenge is sweeping, if it is not also sweet.