The Shooter's Companion

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PARTRIDGE. The partridge is an inhabitant of all the temperate parts of Europe. The extremes of heat and cold are unfavourable to its propagation; and it flourishes best in cultivated countries, living principally on the labours of the husbandman. In Sweden these birds burrow beneath the snow; and the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE PARTRIDGE. The partridge is an inhabitant of all the temperate parts of Europe. The extremes of heat and cold are unfavourable to its propagation; and it flourishes best in cultivated countries, living principally on the labours of the husbandman. In Sweden these birds burrow beneath the snow; and the whole covey crowd together under this shelter to guard against the intense cold. In Greenland the partridge is brown during summer; but as soon as winter sets in, it becomes clothed with a thick and warm down, and its exterior assumes the colour of the snows. Near the mouth of the river Ol, in Russia, the partridges are ili such quantities, that the adjacent mountains are crowded with them.?These birds have been seen variegated with white, and sometimes entirely white, where the climate could not be supposed to have any influence in this variation, and even among those whose plumage was of the usual colour. Partridges have ever held a distinguished place at the tables of the luxurious, both in this country and in France. We have an old distich, If the partridge had the woodcock's thigh, 'Twould be the best bird that e'er did fly. They generally pair early in February; and sometimes after pairing, if the weather be very severe, they collect together again, and form into packs. The female lays her eggs, usually from fifteen to eighteen in number, in a rude nest of dry leaves and grass, formed upon the ground: these are of a greenish-grey colour. The period of incubation is about three weeks. Soclosely do these birds sit on their eggs when near hatching, that a partridge with her nest has been carried in a hat to some distance, and in confinement she has continued her incubation, and there produced young ones. The great hatch is about the middle of June; and the earli...