Handbook to the natural history of Cambridgeshire / edited by J.E. Marr and A.E. Shipley.

Date:
1904
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Handbook to the natural history of Cambridgeshire / edited by J.E. Marr and A.E. Shipley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    96/310 (page 84)
    but they have long ago ceased to provide those quiet haunts which to this shy bird seem indispensable. The eggs were protected by a law of Henry VIIL in 1534, under the same penalty as those of the Crane—twenty pence apiece, but in neither case, as will be seen above, does the Act seem to have produced the desired effect. Attempts have been made of late years to re-establish the Bustard at Feltwell, near Brandon, and at Elveden, near Thetford, but at present without success. A few individuals, however, still occasionally stray to Britain. Professor Newton has kindly furnished me with the follow- ing additional notes on this species :— “ Two stuffed examples of the Bustard from Cambridgeshire are in the University Museum, but whence they were procured is not known; either or both may possibly be of foreign origin, and not of the old English breed. “The late Mr Joseph Clark of Saffron Walden told me that it was said that one of them was shot by a man of the name of Davy of Hinxton, his gun being loaded with a black-lead pencil. The bird was wounded, but flew to Shel- ford, where I suppose it was taken. The story of the other specimen is that it was killed at Ickleton. “ The Museum has also two other English Bustards, one from Icklingham in Suffolk. Of the second nothing is known. “ The Museum contains an egg taken in Cambridgeshire, and given to the Philosophical Society in 1831 by a Mr Barron —concerning whom I have never been able to make out anything. “ The late Dr William Clark, Professor of Anatomy, used to say that once, while riding over Trumpington Heath, he came upon a strange bird on the ground. He took it up and brought it to Cambridge, when, finding that it was a young Bustard, he rode back to the place where he found it and left it there. “At the end of February and beginning of March, 1856, a bustard frequented Burwell Fen and the neighbourhood for