Autumn Flight

When men begin snooping into closets to look up their shotguns, and stand transfixed on the golf course to watch the first wedge of wild geese trade over, out come the publishers with books on the favorite subject of some 5,000,000 U. S. males-wildfowling. This year the autumn book flight includes four of the best:

1) WING SHOTS-Albert Dixon Simmons-Deny dale ($15). Born a Canadian, and a bird lover since his tenth year, Albert Simmons at 44 has perfected a technique of photographing game birds in flight, especially ducks and geese, which is better than most men's technique with a gun. He uses a telephoto lens with a sight such that he can "shoot" at arm's length, as with a fowling piece. He has the eye of a killer to focus and centre his pictures perfectly. Printed. on soft paper his exposures lose some definition, but any experienced gunner will recognize Photographer Simmons' teal, duck and goose action close-ups as the result of shrewd and patient hunting.

2) BISHOP'S BIRDS -Richard E. Bishop J. B. Lippincott ($15). Everyone who shoots wildfowl legally this year will carry in his gunning coat an etching by Artist Bishop-the three wild geese on the Federal "duck stamp," without which no State hunting license is complete. A tiny fraction of this public will drink their after-shooting toddies out of glasses expensively decorated by Bishop's enamel bird silhouets. In this book are found reproductions of 73 of Artist Bishop's best etchings.

3) WINGS, FUR & SHOT (A Grass-roots Guide to American Hunting)-Robert B. Vale-Stackpole ($4). Some people may cry out against this book because its purpose, aside from underscoring some truisms of game conversation, is to tell inexperienced hunters how, when and where to quarry. It runs the North American gamut from squirrels and doves up through bear and turkeys. It is written in short, efficient chapters, with a minimum of glowing reminiscence, a maximum of good hunting sense. Bob Vale has shot wild guinea fowl in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and told a bear to go scat on a Pennsylvania trout stream, but he also rephrases homely old rules like "At partridge, always crack fast"; "At rabbits, shoot low-and watch out for tularemia"; "At quail, wait, then shoot."

4) MORNING FLIGHT-Peter Scott-Scribner ($10). In the front of this fine book is a self-portrait of the only son of the late Captain Robert Scott and the celebrated English sculptor who is now Lady Hilton Young. From his father, who died returning from the South Pole, Peter Scott evidently inherited a determination to be strenuous, and from his mother a plastic talent beyond the ordinary. His book contains reproductions of 51 of his oil paintings, 16 of them in color, and a youthful gunning testament drawn largely from "my wildfowling diary." Few people have painted anything so well as Peter Scott paints the birds he knows so well. Grey lags, pink-footed geese, mallards, wild swans, pintails and barnacle geese work in & out of his Cambridgeshire marshes and mud flats in the true colors and moods of their flighting hours, and with an excitement about their movements kept properly objective by the artist. In his stories about stalking his game, often in a punt with a large shotgun fixed onto the bow, and often shooting by moonlight, Wildfowler Scott will puzzle gunners in the U. S. where such practices are barred and only his "shoulder gun," in daylight, is legal. But U. S. readers will not long question the rightful membership of Peter Scott in best shooting circles when they read: "There is a peculiar aura that surrounds in my mind anything and every thing to do with wild geese. . . .

"For the wildfowler it is not the long winter evenings but the long summer ones that irk.

"Wildfowlers since earliest times have for ever bewailed the disappearance of the good old days. 'Fowling,' they say, 'is not what it was, and probably never will be again.' Ever since Colonel Hawker wrote so scathingly of the Milf ord snobs -that unrivalled garrison of tit-shooters and shore-poppers, writers would have us be lieve that the sport has been on the down grade. But I believe this to be a fallacy.

Even if it were true that 'overshooting' has made the birds so much more difficult to approach, then, so far from spoiling the sport, I contend that it enhances it, for, after all, it is difficulties overcome, far more than the actual bag brought home, that makes wildfowling what it is."

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