COUNTRY LIFE
Close Seasons The close connexion between agriculture and shooting is bringing back into favour the First of September. The date has often been too early, since the fields are not cleared and the young birds not fully grown. Similarly by general consent the First of October is disregarded chiefly because the woods are still full of leaf, but partly because the young birds are stronger on the wing a few weeks later. The woods have not changed their habits but the fields have. I have watched this week from my windows a wheat stubble being ploughed up by a three-furrowed plough behind a powerful tractor that has proceeded at the double. Such sudden and precocious revolutions have helped to change the habits of the partridge- in some essential details. They are wilder than they used to be, in correspondence with the absence of cover ; they fly farther, and they pack earlier. Quite early in the autumn a number of coveys will join together, and sometimes a number of old birds will join together into an apparent covey ; and these companies are wont to fly much greater distances than either the covey or the barren pair. One result is that more people, at any rate on the smaller and less professional shoots, begin to return to the old habit of regarding the First of September as the First indeed.
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