BITTERNS 217 



little change until the second winter, or until the 

 bird is two years old ; and both sexes breed before 

 they have acquired the fully adult plumage. 



BITTERN. Botcmrus stellaris (Linnaeus). PI. 25, fig. 10. 

 Length, 26 to 28 in.; bill, 275 in.; wing, 12-5 in.; 

 tarsus, 8-75 in. 



At one time common in England and Ireland ; 

 but the drainage of marsh-lands has long since 

 deterred it from nesting here. 



In the fourteenth century it was so common 

 in the Cambridgeshire fens, and so esteemed as an 

 edible wildfowl, that the taking of its eggs was 

 prohibited. At a Court Baron of the Bishop of 

 Ely held at Littleport in the eleventh year of 

 Edward II. (May 15, 1318), it is recorded that 

 several persons were fined for collecting the eggs of 

 Bitterns (ova hotorum), and carrying them out of 

 the fen (extra mariscam), to the great destruc- 

 tion of the birds (Selden Society, vol. ii., on the 

 Court Baron). In more recent times Graves, in his 

 "British Ornithology" (1821), mentions a nest on 

 the river Cam, which contained four young birds 

 and an addled egg, and gives a figure of the old 

 bird, which was shot before the nest was found. Both 

 Lubbock and Stevenson refer to the former nesting 

 of the Bittern in Norfolk, and in The Zoologist for 

 1846 (p. 1321) will be found a figure of a young 

 Bittern, which was taken, with an addled egg, from 

 a nest at Ranworth Broad. In 1849 or 1850 a nest 

 containing four eggs was found at Tring Reservoir, 



