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Updated: June 27, 2025
Nothing, he opined, would be simpler, or more agreeable, than to drive out or possibly take a train to some wild spot in the vicinity of London Clapham Common perhaps and spend a day among the pheasants. My American friend wanted to kill an English pheasant. He had heard much of them as the best of game-birds. He had eaten them, much refrigerated, in New York and found them good.
General Harrington looked in his face, and analyzed the play of those handsome features, exactly as he had tasted the game-birds and champagne a half hour before. The same relish was in both enjoyments, only one was the epicureanism of a mind that found pleasure in dissecting a young heart, and the other, quite as important to him, was a delicious sensuality.
These two curlews should be absolutely closed to all shooting everywhere for several seasons. They are on the verge of extinction; and it may even now be too late to save them. The great blue heron and American bittern are not common, but less rare than they are supposed to be. Except for the willow and rock ptarmigans the land game-birds are not many in kind or numbers.
Leopards and bears are to be met with in the higher mountain regions, and wild boars are common in many districts. They inhabit the thickets along the river-banks, in country that would permit of much sound sport in the shape of pig-sticking. Game-birds are found in abundance; both greater and lesser bustard; black and gray partridges, quail, geese, duck, and snipe.
The statistics of the great European cities show a prodigious consumption of game-birds, but the official returns fall far below the truth, because they do not include the rural districts, and because neither the poacher nor his customers report the number of his victims.
Moreover, those who essayed the matter would have access to a much greater range of rapacious birds than our forefathers, who had to content themselves with the limited number of wild species which inhabit the continent of Europe. Especially on our Western plains, where game-birds abound and the country lies wide open, sportsmen would find an admirable field in which to follow the bird they flew.
These are only a few of the most striking birds; but to give an idea of the variety of other birds which may be found in Sikkim, many of which are hardly less beautiful than those above described, we may learn from Gammie that among the birds of prey there are eleven eagles; the peregrine falcon, a little pigmy falcon, and five other falcons; a big brown wood-owl, 2 feet in length, a pigmy owlet measuring only 6 inches, and nine other owls; and six kites; among the game-birds, besides pheasants, three quails, two hill-partridges, a jungle-fowl, woodcock, a snow-cock, and a snow-partridge; among other classes of birds, nine or ten species of pigeons and doves; the European raven and a jungle crow; one jay and several magpies; two hornbills, one of which is 4 feet in length; the common and the Nepal swallow; about thirty species of finches, among them being three bullfinches and eight rose-finches; three or four larks; numerous and varied tits; wagtails; five species of parrots; eight or nine species of wren; thrushes of a dozen species; ten species of robin; and, lastly, many species of waders such as florekin, cranes, plovers, snipe, sandpipers, coots, water-hen, storks, heron, cormorants, terns, divers, and ducks.
He passed by Yalbury-Wood where the game-birds were rising to their roosts, and heard the crack-voiced cock-pheasants "cu-uck, cuck," and the wheezy whistle of the hens. By the time he had walked three or four miles every shape in the-landscape had assumed a uniform hue of blackness.
Venison, and prairie-fowls, and wild ducks, and trout, arid bear's meat, and wild pigeons, and the fish that are to be found in these western rivers, are all good for them that was brought up on 'em, but they tire an eastern palate dreadfully. Give me roast beef any day before buffalo's hump, and a good barn-yard fowl before all the game-birds that ever flew."
Cockfighting was in great force, and the public announcements relative to this barbarous sport were invariably headed by a portraiture of a couple of game-birds facing each other with a most belligerent aspect; while the numerous advertisements of horses 'stolen or strayed, were embellished by a representation of the supposed thief, mounted on the missing animal, which was forced into a breakneck pace, while Satan himself, in propria persona, was perched on the crupper, in an excited and triumphant attitude.
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