CHANCES OF A FIELD NATURALIST.
[To ma EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I can confirm the accuracy of your conjecture in last week's Spectator that those most familiar with woodcock seldom see the parent carry its young. I lived for many years in ArgvIlshire, and devoted much attention to this
most interesting bird, of which I have shot well over a thousand. In Argyll we had them all the year round. I have photographed a woodcock on her neat; have known her to sit on a pheasant egg as well as on her own four eggs ; and have held an inquest on a fresh corpse which resulted in a verdict of " wilful murder " against a brown owl. I have seen the parent carry her young on three occasions : in May, 1886; in June, 1893; and in September, 1902. On the first occasion the woodcock rose some five yards from me out of the ditch beside the main road from Oban to Taynuilt and flew slowly away, holding her chick between her legs and (as a woodcock always flies) with her bill depressed against her breast and her young one. The second time I had a much better view. I was fishing Loch Awe in a boat about twenty yards from the shore when the keeper and I saw a pair of woodcocks flirting and playing with each other on a wet place just above the beach. Presently one of them picked up a young bird which we had not previously seen, carried it over a low dyke, and put it down, presumably to feed in a fresh place. She repeated this several times, and with two other young ones. It was a very pretty picture, and we watched them for some ten minutes. Like Aesop's stag, she feared no foe from the water. On the third occasion I put the parent out of some bill brackens above West Loch Tarbert within a yard of me, having evidently surprised her. I could have almost taken a photograph of her and her chick had I been holding a Kodak. As it was in September, the young one must have been one of a late second brood. I never saw one carrying her young when flying to feed at the gloaming, and I think she would only carry it for a abort distance. I wish you could tell me why woodcocks are always either small red or large grey birds. My theory is that the former are the home bred, the latter the foreigner, because we never saw the latter before the October flight ; but I am not sure if this is the true explanation. In twenty years I never saw a white or a pied bird, but I have a curious sandy-coloured one shot in January, 1901, on the shore of Loch Killisport.—I am,
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