On the Virginia Broadwater

I HAVE just returned from a two weeks' shooting on the Broadwater, by which term I mean that section of sea meadows some forty miles in area, bordering the Chesapeake Bay. Time was in the memory of man, when these islands, mud flats, and sandbank over which the ocean broke in high tide, was the finest sporting ground on the American continent. I have heard old sportsmen tell of the quantity of wildfowl that wintered here, so vast in quantity as almost to stagger belief. Among the many varieties were the two gamest birds that fly, the brant and black duck. This Broadwater was the stopping place of the migrating wildfowl, and estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay were alive with them, and royal sport could be had. I have often heard old man Cobb speak of the huge flocks of brant that wintered around his island, and Nathan, his son, who was the sportsman of the family, made some heavy bags, as high as one hundred and eighty brant in one day's gunning over the decoys.

Just after the war the duck shooting was fine, but it has steadily declined ever since. I have spent several weeks in every winter since 1876 in the Broadwater, and I ought to know something about ducks by this time, and what I learned was beat in my head and impressed on my mind by the hardest kind of experience; I have risked my life over and over again in the stormiest weather, have been capsized twice, cast away on a barren sandbank, losing my decoys; have undergone enough hardships in fighting the storm and been in the blinds in such weather that nothing but a sea gull had any business to be abroad; so I write this not in a boasting vein, but simply to show that I know what I am writing about. And now I want to give a solemn warning to my brother sportsmen, and some advice anent duck shooting, which will be of great value to any misguided man who contemplates coming this way with a gun on his shoulder.

It is this: Don't come down to the Virginia Broadwater duck hunting. Don't go to Cobb's Island, Cape Charles, Ketchum's or the Capes with the expectation of having any brant or wild goose shooting; if you do, you will go back home a wiser and a madder man.

Brant shooting is the most fascinating sport I ever experienced; their size, their rapid flight, the beautiful way they approach the decoys, all combined thrill the sportsman with a keen delight, and make him sit for hours in a blind with the numbing northwest wind blowing a gale, and chilling him to the marrow of his bone, content indeed if he can ever now and then stop one of these black-headed, white-breasted brant in its careering flight, and see the heavy body strike the water with such force as to send the spray high in the air. It requires much infinite patience, and a capacity to wait equal to that of a Pawnee Indian; there are not, on an average, more than two days out of the week when you can shoot brant -- three requisites are absolutely indispensable, a high wind, a flood tide, and a bright sun -- if unless all three perfectly conjoin it is no use to set your decoys. It is weary waiting for the days to drag their weary length out, especially if you are in the confined hold of a vessel, or some island hut.

For the last two years there has been absolutely no brant shooting. There are plenty of birds, but they are as wise as serpents, and have obtained a degree of sagacity that that bird of a devil -- the crow -- would be proud to possess. The brant keep together in one large flock, and neither tempest nor gale can break them; they avoid a blind, with or without decoys, as a jail bird does the policeman. It is simply impossible to stool them. Captain George Hitchings of the Coast Guard of Division No. 5 told me yesterday that though that king of gunners, Nathan Cobb, with all of his thirty years' experience, and with the aids of perfect decoys, only killed eight brant last winter, Tom Spady, of Cobb's Island, an ardent and enthusiastic sportsman, has given up the sport in disgust.

For two weeks I have tried the most famous blinds in the Broadwater, and have not had a single shot at the brant that would not come within a half mile of the blind. I am done; never again in my life will I try brant hunting in this region; it is, to use a slang expression -- simply "played out."

The black ducks are very scarce, but to any one with more ammunition than he knows what to do with, and who is fond of popping at feathered things, there are hundreds and thousands of coots, loons, didappers, water witches, bull-heads, etc., that he can fill his bag -- but hardly his stomach with.

The Hygeia Hotel is thronged with sportsmen on their way to Florida and the South. This seems to be the favorite stopping place of the fraternity, and to see some of the outfits that some of them carry, one would think they were on a trip with Stanley in the heart of Africa instead of simply going to spend a couple of months in the land of flowers

OLD POINT COMFORT, Va., Dec. 20.

CHASSEUR.