The greatest assistance given by driving is probably the greater freedom from wounds of the driven bird. The old bad days, when we killed all the birds that would lie, and shot at all the others, were bad, because there was no other way of getting a bag of wild birds; but probably if nobody had ever tried to do so there would have been plenty of partridges. In other words, it was bad shooting that destroyed the stock. But more than this, partridge driving is liked; it has caused much greater attention to be paid to the partridge than ever before, because it is so much better sport than turnip-trotting, and so much more bag-filling than shooting over the majority of show-bred or show-dog crossed pointers and setters. It takes a very good dog indeed to please in a turnip-field and to render it unnecessary to form line to beat up the partridges. Besides that, driving is a social amusement, whereas shooting over dogs is only good when there are but two guns or less. The popularity of the big day extends to beaters, farm hands, and farmers, whereas for the old method these people were merely tolerated. Toleration did not assist preserving; popularity does so.
Although a swerving covey of English birds will present a task fit for a king, there are very many very easy driven birds, including the majority of straight-coming Frenchmen. Besides this, the position of the shooter makes them easy or difficult as the case may be. Put too close under a high fence, the birds are difficult; put farther back, they swerve, or turn back over the beaters. When standing up to quite low fences, the chances are very easy, and when the sun is in one’s eyes they are too difficult for sport. The most beautiful shooting is when some birds come over, and some between, a row of high elm trees such as one frequently sees in the Midlands, but less often in the Eastern Counties.
There is no more beautiful sport than shooting partridges over good dogs, and it is easy to get them good enough for the work in wild country, where they are almost exclusively employed, but it takes brains as well as nose and pace for a dog to be a help to the two guns in turnips a couple of feet high, and such as contain a hundred thrushes, blackbirds, leverets, rabbits, and pheasant poults to every covey of partridges. It is true that if shooters in line, for sentimental reasons, have a pointer running loose, they may call it shooting over dogs, and any sort of animal will do for that, even if he is a dog show Champion; but that is not what the author means by shooting over dogs.
If you have a line of guns to tread up the game, dogs are superfluous. If you have dogs that can find everything, then a line of beaters is superfluous, and besides in the way, too, for it makes birds wild.
Noise is often said to make partridges wild, but this is only partially true. Noise in any one direction, such as talking, generally makes them fly, but any noises heard from all directions simultaneously makes them lie like stones.
No country is so difficult to drive as one with small fields and high hedges, especially if it is also hilly. It is almost impossible to make the partridges know that there is a line of beaters outside of their own little field, and they are very likely to go out at the flanks and swing back behind the beaters in the next field.
That the fox is the worst partridge poacher in the nesting season is not questioned by those who know; but the plan described in the previous chapter is a very good and the only way of securing many partridges in a fox country. Nevertheless, this plan has been written down in the press, obviously by interested people, who appear in all sorts of disguises in the interests of game-food makers, who are aware that if the Euston plan of pheasant preserving and the Stetchworth plan of partridge preserving were to be commonly practised, it would be all over with game-food manufacturers. The author first described the Stetchworth plan some time before Mr. Alington’s book appeared, in which he related Mr. Pearson Gregory’s wonderful success with partridges in the middle of the Belvoir country, where foxes abound. In place of this safeguard against foxes, futile attempts have put forward evil-smelling mixtures to protect the nests; but, as Mr. Alington and Mr. Holland Hibbert have shown, when foxes take one doctored nest they then hunt for the smell, and in the experience of Mr. Alington the mixture was successful the first year, but in the next all the dressed nests were taken and the others left. That a large number of keepers may approve of evil-smell systems, and disapprove of the Stetchworth partridge, and the Euston pheasant, systems, has no weight with those who know that there are wheels within wheels, which can be specified if necessary.
That there are smells which destroy or negative others, the author is sure, but he has no belief in drowning one by the strength of another. No retriever can find a dead bird if a man stands close to leeward of the latter and to windward of the dog’s nose. Out of politeness to our race, we may consider this negatives the partridge scent and does not merely drown it, but then the deer do not support that view, and can smell a man much farther off than a foxhound can smell a fox. The question arises, What is a strong smell to a fox, a dog, or a deer?
A gamekeeper can (because he has done it at Harlaxton, in Lincolnshire) look after 1500 acres of partridge ground and get hatched off by the Stetchworth plan 1200 eggs, and do it single-handed, so that the expense that the interested critics of this system talk of does not exist.
The fox has just been condemned as a poacher, but all the same he is a great friend of partridge preservers, if they would only look ahead. The fox is the only influence in this country that prevents half of it becoming poultry runs. He takes his toll, and deserves it. Land will not afford more than a certain amount of insect life, and young partridges cannot live without it. If it were not for the foxes, nearly every farm and field would be a chicken run, and consequently wild bred partridges would be impossible.