Sociology on the Wing

Grousing isn't what it used to be in Britain.

By the time the grouse season opened in Britain last week, on the "Glorious Twelfth" of August, it was all too plain that austerity and high taxes and a dearth of rich American visitors had decimated the crop of sportsmen. Grouse shooting is an expensive sport; each bird costs its slayer an average of -L-1 ($4)..Fewer beaters were available; the sportsmen often had to tramp around the moors flushing out their own birds, instead of waiting decently in ambush. There were plenty of birds: King George bagged 60 his first day. The London Times unbent to give a grouse-eye view of the situation:

"The grouse, for whom this is a day of some importance, must view with curiosity not unmixed with satisfaction the progressive weakening of the forces which his enemy is able to put into the field . . . Perched on the crumbling parapet of an ill-drained butt [a dugout for grouse-shooters], he cannot but contemplate with sardonic eye the scanty and dilapidated motor transport assembling at roadhead in the glen below him. The sun . . . no longer flashes from the coachwork of immaculate limousines backing and filling on the turf . . . The escort of dogs is more imperfectly disciplined. The unit has lost most of its auxiliaries--the pony men, the bearers of cameras and mackintoshes and flasks, the underkeeper who combined the functions of guide with those of a minor and excessively gloomy prophet ... By tea time today, the grouse should have enough material for a short sociological treatise--unless, of course, confused by so many departures from precedent, he had departed from precedent himself and flown into the flak."

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