We skip a few hours, since we have no intention of inflicting on the reader the details of a morning's flight-shooting. Suffice that at 9 A.M. B. reappears poling up in his punt, the spoils are collected (forty-nine in all, mostly wigeon and teal, with a few pintail and shoveler and one couple of gadwall), and the plan for the day discussed. To remain where we were (as this _lucio_ had yesterday attracted a fairly continuous flight of ducks) had been our original idea. But a shift of the wind had rendered a second _lucio_, distant two miles, a more favourable resort for to-day, and thither accordingly we set out. Here a new _puesto_ is promptly prepared and the forty-nine decoys deftly set out, each supported by a supple wand stuck in the mud below. Hardly had these preparations been completed, than the intermittent (or secondary) flight had commenced, file after file of ducks heading up from distant space, wheeling over or dashing past the seductive decoys. At recurring moments during the next three or four hours (with blank intervals between) I enjoyed to the full this most delightful form of wildfowling, so totally different in practice to all others. Such is the speed of flighting fowl, such their keenness of vision and instant perception of danger, that but a momentary point of time--say the eighth of a second--is available fully to exploit each chance. Should the gunner rise too quick, the ducks are beyond the most effective range; yet within a space not to be measured by figures or words, they will have detected the fraud, and in a flash have scattered, shooting vertically upwards like a bunch of sky-rockets. Two features in the life-history of the duck-kind become apparent. The first points to the probability that adults pair for life, and that the mated couples keep together all winter even when forming component units in a crowd. For when an adult female is shot from the midst of a pack, the male will almost invariably accompany her in her fall to the very surface of the water, and will afterwards circle around, piping disconsolately, and even return again and again in search of his lost partner. This applies chiefly to wigeon, but we have frequently observed the same trait in pintail and occasionally in other species. It is only the drakes that display this constancy; a bereaved female continues her flight unheeding. The feature is most conspicuous when awaiting ducks at their feeding-grounds (_comederos_), but it also occurs when shooting on their flight-lines (_correderos_) between distant points.