Duck Shooting
There was a time when the passenger pigeon darkened the skies as it crossed America. Some accounts of their migrations tell how they came over so thickly that the men who waylaid them with guns did not need to take aim but simply discharged their fowlihg-pieces into the air. It is, neverthe- less, hard to believe that other factors did not play a more important part in the passenger pigeon's becoming extinct. I thought about this when a Canadian friend wrote to say that he could recall when the sky in his part of Manitoba was sometimes darkened by wild fowl moving south at the approach of winter. Today Canadian game laws impose limits on the bags of duck shooters with the result that • That's your thirty' has become a stock phrase in the duck country. In Britain we are poor in wild fowl by comparison and the nature of out estuaries and duck haunts prevents the imposition of a bag limit, but I think thi reasons for claims of fewer wild fowl can be endlessly debated. They concern not only shooting but food, the weather at particular seasons and in particular years, to say nothing of the fallibility of memory.
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