GREAT BUSTARD. I05 



Order CHARADRIIFORMES. 

 Family OTIDID.^. Bustards. 



Long-legged running birds with three toes, united at the base 

 and fringed with membrane. 



Great Bustard. Otis tarda Linn. 



Up to the end of the eighteenth century the Great Bustard 

 (Plate 42) nested in wild open spaces in England and south-east 

 Scotland, and the " droves " which roamed over the Yorkshire 

 wolds, Salisbury Plain, and similar uncultivated areas were 

 often immense, but the bird was too big and edible to survive. 

 Early in the nineteenth century it vanished from Salisbury, and 

 though a few pairs lingered in East Anglia and Yorkshire until 

 the late 'thirties, spread of cultivation, increase of population , and, 

 perhaps more than either, improvement in sporting guns, swept 

 them away. So to-day the Great Bustard is only an occasional 

 winter visitor to our eastern counties, sometimes arriving in 

 such numbers as to suggest invasion, or, possibly, repopulation. 

 In central and southern Europe, notably in Spain, and in 

 western Asia, it survives locally, but everj-where suffers where 

 man can outwit it. It is not, apparently, a regular migrant, but 

 an occasional wanderer. 



The large size of the Great Bustard renders it an easy bird 

 to see and identify, and a tempting mark for the gunner, for a 

 male is as big and tasty as a Turkey, and may weigh over 

 30 lbs. Indeed, when in 1900 Lord Walsingham turned a 

 number of birds down, they foolishly wandered and were soon 

 accounted for. The Bustard walks with " stately and dtliberate 

 gait," carries the body horizontal and the head well erect ; in 

 Spain it frequents cornfields, and is thus often partially hidden. 

 It feeds largely on grain and other vegetable substances, but 



