But you may sometimes get good sport even with Greys.
You may get them into standing crops ; gram by choice, when
nearly ripe, very luxuriant, and grown in soil which breaks up
into huge heavy clods (never broken or smoothed after sowing
gram), and in this no bird can run.
In such places they are obliged to lie, and then they afford
very good shooting. Near the junction of the Jumna and the
Chambal, behind Bhurrey (and the birds swarm in the ravines
all round), there were fields in which, year after year, I used,
when the gram was just beginning to ripen, to bag for three or
four successive days from ten to fifteen (and once I got 21) brace
in a couple of hours shooting in the evening.
You may also have some fun, where the scrub is in moderatesized
patches, by hiding behind a bush outside one end, and
putting the beaters in at the other, and so getting the birds driven
over and past you. Of course you get hares also, and a buck
possibly, and it is real lazy sport, as you can ride your pony from
patch to patch, get heaps of shots, and never walk a yard !
Captain Butler says :—
" The most successful way of shooting Grey Partridge, so far
as my experience goes, is to take a dog out with you ; any dog
that will hunt about will do. The birds then, instead of running,
fly up into the nearest trees the moment they see the dog,
whence they can easily be dislodged and shot." I have tried
this plan also with some success.
But, as a rule, they arc not worth going after, and when shot
even in places far from villages, they are hardly worth eating,
since, cook them as you will, the flesh, though white, is hard, dry
and insipid.
Partridge-fighting, the birds being naturally excessively
pugnacious, is a very favourite sport amongst Muhammadans.
Lucknow used to be a great place for this ; and they become
very tame in captivity, and all classes of natives are fond of
keeping them as pets, so that there is a considerable demand
for these birds. As remarked by Mr. Reed, writing from
Lucknow:—
" Good birds, i.e., males, command a large price in the market,
and the native bird-catchers are for ever after them, caring little
how or when they effect their capture, whether in or out of
season. Some of these gentlemen catch the young birds just
after they have left the shell ; others again lift the eggs and
hatch them under domestic hens. Their plan of capturing old
males in snares, nets, trap-cages, &c, with the aid of call birds,
answers well, judging from the numbers weekly brought into
the market for sale. Sometimes the wild bird may be taken by
the hand when engaged in fighting the call bird, which is let
loose into the jungle for the purpose, but the surest way—and
that I believe most generally adopted here—is to throw a net
over them both."
Col. Tickell's account of one mode of capture is full and interesting.
He says :—
" The pugnacious disposition of this bird renders it one of the
easiest of all game to catch, and there is hardly a village in the
wilder parts of Upper and Western Bengal where this amusement
is not carried on. For this purpose, a tame one is placed
in a small cage covered with strong horse-hair nooses, and carried
out of an evening or early morning to the jungle. On arriving
at a likely spot, the fowler blows two or three times upon the
bird in the cage, an act which has the invariable effect of
rousing the little captive into fury. It answers every puff by a
shrill cry, and in a minute or so goes off into a paroxysm of
rage and defiance, screaming and cackling challenges to all
comers, in which state it is placed on the ground, dancing about
in its cage, while the fowler retires behind some neighbouring
bush to watch operations. The decoy bird's calls have been
answered probably all round the coppice by the time its master
is hidden, and ere long an exceedingly diverting scene, which I
have more than once witnessed in Singhbhoom, ensues. One by
one the wild cock birds, whose crows have been audible nearer and
nearer, emerge from the covert, heads up, wings down, and tails
spread, and, after showing off in a species of war-dance before
the cage, the nearest rushes at it with a charge that would send
it rolling off the scene were it not securely pegged to the ground.
The bird within and the bird without engage furiously, a la
Pyramus and Thisbe—but with kicks instead of kisses—through
the intervening wall, till after a few interchanges of this nature,
the assailant finds himself fast by the leg in one of the nooses.
The fowler runs out, detaches the captive, and retreats with it
to his ambuscade, whereupon the other wild birds, which have
been scared away at sight of the man, quickly re-assemble, and
the same scene is enacted with another champion, and so on,
da capo, till the whole are secured, or till the decoy bird has become
exhausted and sulky."
T H E GREY PARTRIDGE is found and breeds throughout the
more open and drier plains country of India Proper. It eschews
equally the more humid tracts of Lower Bengal, the Duns
and Terais that skirt the bases of the Himalayas, and the dense
forests and forest-clad hills of Southern, Central, and Eastern
India.
It breeds regularly twice a year, laying from the first week in
February to the first week in June, and again from the middle of
July to early in November. But I think that there are always
more nests to be found in the spring than in the autumn,
and I suppose, therefore, that all the birds do not have a second
brood.
The nest, when there is one—for I have repeatedly found
the eggs on the bare ground—varies from a few blades of grass,