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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."