Excerpt from The Complete Wildfowler It is perhaps the fact of collaboration which makes a preface to a book of this sort necessary. More than two years ago Mr. Stanley Duncan and myself agreed that a complete Wildfowler should be written. A good deal of material was already available, most of it consisting of Mr. Stanley Duncan's constant and valuable contributions to The Shooting Times and The Field on the subject of wildfowling, the rest being my own notes extending over a considerable period of one's sporting life. From the time of Colonel Hawker until fifteen years ago, all the published books upon wildfowling were excellent in their measure and in their day. The later books have been excellent also, but have been shorter and more in the fashion of the handbook or manual. It seemed good, therefore, to the collaborators that they should make a sustained effort to produce a book which might possibly be a standard work for a considerable period. It will be as well to give some indication of the respective parts taken by the collaborators in the production of this work. It has fallen to me to be the general editor. It has been a labour of love and a strange relief from the continuous production of fiction. The book, however, owes its real value undoubtedly to the work in it of Mr. Stanley Duncan, the chief organiser and honorary secretary of the Wildfowlers' Association, and a sportsman whose name is as well known to all fowlers as his genial personality and remarkable excellence with the gun is known to a certain section of them. I myself have written the introductory parts and the chapters dealing with guns and ammunition, "The Complete Gun-Room," etc. etc. The important branch of shore shooting and the chapters on punt-gunning have been written by Mr. Stanley Duncan, though edited by me. The illustrations and diagrams are also the work of Mr. Stanley Duncan. The ornithological part is a joint production, with the aid of many of the leading authorities upon the subject. I have here to say, and I say it with some complacency, that the chapter upon shoulder guns was submitted to Mr. W. W. Greener himself; one or two suggestions he made I very gladly incorporated. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.