There is something engagingly dotty about certain aspects of French hunting or "la chasse". Maybe indeed with more than the French. Take the hunting/shooting of the lapwing or peewit (a bird which is fully protected in Ireland). There are hunters of this bird, especially in the Gironde who shoot them from special huts built for the purpose in watery or boggy areas - "lovely hunting" or "une belle chasse", as the magazine "Le Chasseur Francais" tells us. And it says that it is impossible to be a good lapwing shooter if you cannot imitate the plaintive cry of the bird, which arrives in France in the autumn and goes off to northern or central Europe when the frosts come to an end. But not everyone can reproduce the cry of the bird (which the magazine oddly compares to that of a baby), without the help of some instrument. There are home-made whistles and commercially-made whistles which are admirable in their own way, but nothing can replace the human voice alone.
Take Jacques Noel, described as the king of the lapwings. When young, he was an expert at it. But then his voice broke in adolescence and later, says the article, cigarette-smoking hardened up his vocal chords. But he has a solution to make him once again a telling attraction for the birds he loves to shoot. There is a good picture to illustrate this. Here is a man of at least mature years, with his tongue out, showing a piece of greenery on it. Before going out after the lapwing, he takes from his garden the leaf of a leek, cuts it into a few pieces of about five centimetres long. He takes a piece, and carefully, with his nail, levers off a layer which is "as translucid as the wing of a dragonfly". All he has to do is to slip this between his tongue and his palate and he can whistle with the best of them. He used to catch lapwings by a method no longer permitted in his region, i.e., luring them down with a whistle and by putting out live decoys and artificial ones, then releasing a net which shot out and covered the birds.
Now he can lure them down by whistle, decoys, live and artificial, but may only shoot them. This is done, as always, from those lapwing huts, more or less permanent, it would appear, low structures of corrugated iron and planks, and well camouflaged by bushes and whatever. These are carefully situated under what is known as a corridor of migration. This season is over, otherwise the magazine would have had one or two splendid recipes for cooking the bird. Next year Mr Noel, it is expected, will be back with his leek, whistling.