CHAPTER LX 



THE SEA-EAGLE 



One lovely day in the early spring of '91, as I walked 

 under the tall steeple of Winterton Church, I saw a large 

 bird beating over the hummocky warrens, flying like a 

 harrier. 



The sandhills glittered in the sun like snow-peaks, and the 

 bleak scrubby vegetation of the sandy marshes around that 

 squalid village looked blacker than usual as I saw this large 

 bird alight on the warren to eat some incautious rabbit. 1 

 suspected him to be an eagle, and my suspicions were con- 

 firmed; for that very night a keeper at Somerton shot him 

 as he was flying into a fir-tree in a planting to roost for 

 the night. And such are the glimpses you get of the eagle 

 in the Broadlands. A large bird is seen shaling above the 

 marshes or " warrants," and you hear a day or so after that 

 an " eagle " has been shot. But the birds are very rare 

 thereabouts. 



A young fenman, in whom I have complete trust, told me 

 that when he was a boy he saw two of them beating over 

 the "warrants," like great old "buzzards," one day; but 

 the next, he came across one of them imprisoned in a trap, 

 and the remains of thirteen rabbits around him, food that 

 his mate had brought him. 



We merely get glimpses of this eagle in the Broads, and 

 I have never heard that wild saddle-back gull-like cry of 

 his, as I have elsewhere. 



i8s 



