University of Virginia Library

3. NO. III.
A FIT, BROUGHT ON BY LOOKING AT A PICTURE;
SUFFERED BY J. CYPRESS Jr.

White, in his “Natural History of Selbourne,” calls the
Woodcock “Scolopax,” simply. Latham dubs him “Scolopax
Rusticola.” Wilson christens him “Scolopax Minor.”
This is, probably, the true patronymic of the American bird,
as he is a “minor,”—a smaller animal than that described by
the ornithologists of the old world. If you go to Delmonico's,
to eat out of season, you will ask for “la Becasse,” and
be mistaken for a Frenchman, and get a private room, and so,
perhaps, avoid detection. Sportsmen, generally, among
themselves, talk of killing “cock;” but if they meet an old
woman in the woods, and want information where to beat,
they ask her if she “has seen any blind snipes.” A straggling
boy will pocket your sixpence, and send you up a rugged
mountain, on whose either side he will assure you there
are “plenty of wood-cocks,” and you will go and find, after a
weary travel, that you have had your tramp after red-headed
wood-peckers.

Seeing, therefore, that the nomenclature is uncertain, and
sometimes undignified, reducing a much valued visitor to the
caste of a common dunghill chanticleer; and, moreover, as
this is the age of reform of unworthy names, we propose to
introduce to our readers the excellent subject of this article
by his true title of “Scolopax minor.” Let him have honor
and welcome under that designation. He is cousin germain

to “Scolopax Gallinago,,”—commonly called the “English”
snipe,—undeservedly, too,—for he is a native-born “Alleghanian,”—and
feeds on similar food,—though he uses less salt
than his aforesaid relative,—and speaks the same language
differing only a little, in dialect. Listen to the one in latter
August, in the corn fields, and to the other in decaying
Autumn, on his boggy meadows, and you will hear them speak
their true name, when you flush them. Only Sc. minor is
fainter in his utterance, and in breeding season, and in the
woods, utters other voices. But both have undoubtedly, derived
their family name from their cry,—their Scolopaxian
“good bye,” “I'm off.” Anatomize the word, and take
out the vowels, which, when a bird is in a hurry, he cannot
be expected to have time to put in. Try it. Sclpx! The
trail is out, but is not the body of the sound perfect?

We like the whole tribe of bipeds belonging to this ordo,
whether allied to the genus of long-billed Curlew, Heron,
Sandpiper, or any other created or manufactured species.
They are the only people who come to us with long bills,
whom we are particularly anxious to see. If any boy of theirs
comes to us and says, “here is your bill, Sir,”—kick him
out?—we do not. We are more likely to be kicked in our
own shoulder by the reaction of the hearty greeting with
which we welcome him. We make a point—if we are on
the upland, our dog does too,—to return the heaviest compliments
for the presentation, so that we sometimes overwhelm
our visitor with confusion and faintness, by the warmth and
pressure of our reception.

But as we have a right to pick our friends, so we have to
pick our birds;—our enemy would say—the first to the
pocket, the last to the bone. We would take issue on that
allegation, and set the case down for hearing, in Chancery,

upon pleadings and proofs,—to be heard in 1841, and decided
in 1857. Decision doubtful. The distributor of justice might
have had a good pick at his dinner, or he might have a bad
pique against the complaining or defending sinner, and the
cause would have to run the gauntlet. Trust to luck. Luck
sometimes operates like a powerful argument. Kaimes over-looked
it in his book on Rhetoric. So did Blair. Collins
says nothing about it in his Ode on the passions. Maltheus
had a glimpse of the truth, but he was afraid to tell fully his
imperfect vision. His apocalypse is not revealed. Wait.
Meantime, we will pick Master Scolopax out from the company
of all the long-bills, and deliver him to sacrificial fire.

Mark! there's a bird! While we were rambling on, you,
dear reader, unconsciously and harmlessly—for he has no
fangs—trod upon a black snake; and we flushed a quail;
but October 25th was not yet, and he was safe. There, now,
is a cock—a woodcock,—Scolopax minor. See how splendidly,
cautiously, patronizingly, hungrily, Jim Crow stands!
Splendidly,—for the reputation of his own nose and figure;
cautiously,—for his master's chance to see the bird rise;
patronizingly,—for the benefit of the unhappy victim, [even
as a carpenter landlord smiles upon a widow tenant of a single
room in his miserable structure, called a house, in the
eighth ward, paying weekly in advance one quarter of the value
of the whole tenement, when he distrains and sells the portrait
of her husband, and her last silver spoon, for the rent not yet
earned]; hungrily,—not with selfish, animal appetite—for a
good dog eats no birds—but with generous consideration for
your own teeth, after his careful lips have tasted the taste of
the feathers, which his full-crowded mouth will soon bring to
you unruffled.

That suggestion is for your imagination's sake, dear pupil;

but you may make it fact if you can spare a thousand dollars,
and buy Jim. In the engraving antecedent, which we had
rather illustrate with powder and shot and wet boots, than
with pen and ink, is exhibited a variation of the exciting toil.

Scolopax is there heaven-bound. Doubly so; for there is
a messenger after him to bring him to—by him—an undesired
Paradise. He, may, unless he can fly faster than the
leaden missive which you see preparing to pursue him, suck
his julep by night-fall in another elysium than his own
sheltered wood-lake. The setters seem to be at fault, and
have, probably, flushed the fugitive. The distance, however,
is short, the sight is unobstructed, and the bird is doomed to
a deliberate death. Ye, who have not known the beatitude
of Scolopaxian collineation, look on with wonder and mute
admiration!

There are some unlucky people, who have never enjoyed
the acquaintance of Sc. minor. To them we say, cut him
not, unless with a delicate knife after he has been embalmed
upon a bed of toasted milk-biscuit, with his head resting upon
a minute slice of Floridan orange. He belongs to the best
society, and is worthy of your recognition. The books of
ornithological heraldry give him emblazonment. Take Wilson
for the authority of your introduction, and learn to know
him well. Read this advertisement of his quality, and mistake
him not:

Why every feather of his head is counted and labelled.
Such is the honorable estimation in which Master Scolopax
hath been held among the aristocracy of ornithologists.

Sc. minor is a sort of citizen, although he only rusticates
and squats among our cedars, or in our deep swamps, as in a
summer country-seat. He could bring an action of trespass
and recover damages, for his frequent dispossession, if he
could only persuade the sheriff to summon a jury “de medietate
linguœ.” But that mercy is abolished by the Revised
Statutes, and he has to take his chance of escape from “forcible
entry and detainer,” with the rest of the unfortunate proprietors
who hold under doubtful titles. He arrives here from
the South during the month of February, or just so soon as
the thawing mud-puddles will yield to his hungry mandible,
and permit him to bore for the delicate larvæ beginning to
wake up from their winter's sleep. Love, nidification, and
good eating, are then his chief employment. At morning and
evening twilight he amuses himself with a spiral flutteration
above the tree-tops, murmuring an epithalamic song which
none but a snipe could compose,—“dulce modulamine mulcet,”—while
she, his mate, below, nourishes in the rude
oak-leaf nest, the young victims whom both parents so sedulously
prepare for your killing in next July. Fatal first! how
the weak-winged chickens tumble! The survivors, in the
succeeding month, seek securer and cooler waters further

North. Approaching winter brings them back in clusters.
Then resound the woods with echoing volleys. October
heaps up slaughtered hecatombs. Alas? for the love of
blood! The month has come, and our Westley Richards is
ready!

We are almost too sentimental to be a good shot. Doubtless,
the fear of guiltiness of volucricide may account for many,
otherwise unpardonable, misses we have committed, when we
have nearly trod upon a bevy of quail; or when a sudden
partridge whirred like lightning over a neighboring thicket,
and our fluttering forefinger scattered too long lingering missives
among the innocent bushes. On the whole, although a
man must do his duty, “painful as it is,”—as a Judge would
say to a felon whom he is going to sentence to death,—yet it
would be better for a collineomaniac to think, now and then,
of the desolation he is bringing down upon happy nests; of
how many little broods he may cause to starve; of how many
robbed mates he will send, nubivagant, whistling and singing
tremulous love notes through the air, vainly searching and
calling for their lost spouses, never, never to return! To do
so, would have a powerful moral effect upon every sportsman.
It would increase the size of his organ of veneration, and diminish
the detestable bumps of destructiveness and acquisitiveness.
He would not kill more than were needful for his
family, a few immediate friends, and his own honor. He
would also augment his organ of pity in two ways; First, by
his forbearance, and regret for those doomed birds whom he
cannot help cut down; and, secondly, by his consideration
for other murderers who are to come after him next day, and
who, like him, have wives or sweethearts, and pride. In this
latter view of the matter, he would learn another noble lesson.
Pity is not only “akin to love,” but its sister or brother.—The

sex, here, is probably masculine.—He would learn to “love
his neighbor as himself;” and not, like a grasping glutton, bag
all. By all our hopes! we hold that villain a dangerous citizen,
who heaps up mounds of unnecessary carcases, and brags
of the numbers he has slaughtered. We distrust his honesty,
and think of the potency of silver shot put into the hands of
country boys who watch by dusk at ponds. He would shoot
at a covey of partridges skulking by the side of an old log,
upon the ground! He is a cockney, and no true sportsman,
and should be condemned to set snares and shoot for market.

We are thinking now of the breeders and whistlers of our
own fields and woods; not of the travelling passengers who
merely dip into our waters, and marshes, on their way to the
northern springs, and on their return to tropical bayous and
hammocks, and who are cosmopolites, and no fellow-countrymen.
They are strangers and may be taken in. Shoot and
kill. Yet even for some of these we plead. Break not up
the feeding places of the Brant, nor dig a hole near the sanding
spot of the goose. Let them have some quiet water-lot,
free from taxes, where they may repose after a weary flight,
and do not rout them from every broad shallow and hidden
nook. If the passion for collineation rages, insatiable, get
Raynor Rock, or one of his boys, to row you out into the
breakers, and bang away at Scoter, Surf, and Velvet ducks,
whom Long Island baymen, unlawfully, call “Coot.” “Number
2,” and heavy loads, and a whiffing skiff, will soon lame
your shoulder, and gratity your ambition.

A sportsman is not proven by the numbers he produces, but
by the telling of his shots, and by his time. No true gentleman
ought to labor on the uplands, soaking his fustian with
day-light dew, and dragging weary legs through twilight mud.
There might be an honest match made, we admit, touching

the number of Cock on a given day. But the event would
depend not only upon the skill, coolness, and good dog of the
performer, but upon the length and strength of legs, and all the
ordinary capacities of a foot-racer. He who walks three
miles, and kills eighteen birds out of twenty, in four hours,
and comes home before noon, is entitled to the palm in preference
to the painful toiler, who tramps all day and blunders
down fifty wingtips, missing at every other shot.

Nevertheless, we have been in the solemn woods all day,
and have dallied with solitary nature, until dusky evening
whispered in our ear, to skip and jump down the rough oxcart
precipices, called roads, and when sombre clouds and interwoven
branches of tall trees shut out even the light of the
flashing torch of the lightning, except when once it shivered,
ten yards before us, an enormous oak, to whose hypocritical
welcome of towery leaves we were hastening for protection
from the beginning hail storm, and when the thunderbolt that
burst upon the stricken giant, stunned our fearful ears, and
threw us trembling back upon a sharp rock which quivered in
its tottering tenancy of the edge of a deep ravine, and then
plunged down the precipice, leaving us clinging and climbing
with desperate strength upon the uncertain sand and crumbling
clay. Bear witness, ye mountains of Haverstraw! Did not
the storm scream, and the trees groan, and the cataracts of
mixed hail-stones and torrent rain-water sweep down the hill
side? Did we not imbibe a hot brandy sling when we arrived
at Job's, and put on a dry shirt and go to bed?—But,
were we beating for birds all day? No, no. Eleven o'clock,
A. M., found us, not weary but languid, by a leaping stream,
clear and pure as our Mary's eyes, and of a similar color; and
we took out our smitten prey, and smoothed their feathers
down, and arranged them in a row, and looked at them, and

[ILLUSTRATION]

WILD DUCK SHOOTING.

thought of death and graves, and then we dipped into the musical
water and lipped Castalian glories, and laved our hot
brow, and then fell into a cool resting-place upon some short
sweet grass by the side of a hazel bush, and took from our
pocket Thompson's “Seasons,” and read, and fell asleep,
dreaming of the beautiful Musidora. Musidora cost us a wet
jacket, and a heavy cold. Nothing but thunder could have
awakened us from that dream.

We seem to hear even now the murmuration of that rivulet,
and a woodcock getting up by its side. We are off. Reader,
farewell.