2-982-532 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Wild Fowl Shooting, 1858. 'The most numerous class of our wild-fowl visitors from the Arctic shores is the brent or black goose...The white geese are generally considered to consist of four different species: the grey leg, the white-fronted goose, the bean goose, and the pink-toed goose...On the square-topped Bass Rock, near North Berwick, the solan geese, too, may be seen in thousands. They are said to lay only one egg, and to sit with their foot on it the livelong month of May...Naturalists have observed extraordinary changes in the flocks of white geese, as up to a given period they consist of the great grey goose, and then, although the flocks apparently remain stationary, the grey geese disappear, and the white-fronted geese fill their places. Believers in witchcraft might revel in hypotheses, especially as witches riding on geese form no inconsiderable portion of nursery lore...The Cromarty Firth is a favourite spot with the punters; and Sir John R. Carnac, Bart., M.P., is reported to have killed twenty-five brent geese at one shot with a punt-gun. All the birds were picked up dead, and deponent sayeth not how many became "cripples" from that slaughtering battery...the pleasure of shooting them is many degrees beyond the pleasure of eating them'. From "Illustrated London News", 1858.