200 OTIDID.E. 



had already disappeared from Hampshire ; and as regards 

 Sussex, of which Gilbert White, writing to Daines Barring- 

 ton on the 8th of October, 1770, from Ringmer, near Lewes, 

 says : — " There are Bustards on the wide Downs above 

 Brighthelmstone," the native race must shortly afterwards 

 have become extinct. Mr. Knox, in his ' Systematic Cata- 

 logue of the Birds of Sussex,' published in 1855, says, p. 222, 

 " I have met with some very old joeople who, in their younger 

 days, have seen flocks of this noble bird on the Downs." 



From the downs of Berkshire, Hertfordshire, and Cam- 

 bridgeshire, the Great Bustard passed away unrecorded, a 

 male killed near Ickleton being, perhaps, the last of the 

 indigenous birds in the latter county. Nor is it known 

 when it vanished from the Wolds of Lincolnshire. In 

 Boswell's • Life of Johnson,' there is a letter from the great 

 lexicographer to his friend Bennet Langton, of Langton, 

 near Wragby, in that county, dated 9th January, 1758, in 

 which he says : — " I have left off house-keeping, and there- 

 fore made presents of the game you were pleased to send me. 

 The Pheasant I gave to Mr. Richardson, the Bustard to Dr. 

 Lawrence " ; and down to about 1825 it appears to have 

 bred on the estate of Sir Charles Anderson at Hawold. 

 Across the Humber, it would appear, from the investiga- 

 tions of Mr. W. E. Clarke, who has carefully collected 

 and sifted the evidence, that the Bustard continued to 

 exist on the Eastern Wolds so long as they remained as 

 undulating barren sheep-walks. The southern portion was 

 the first to be deserted, and the extension of tillage, the 

 introduction of early and artificial crops, and the spread of 

 enclosures, inevitably led to the decrease of the Bustards in 

 their remotest refuge about Flixton, Hunmanby, and Reigh- 

 ton. It is believed that the existence of the indigenous 

 Great Bustard in Yorkshire ceased in 1832 or 1833, when 

 the last hen bird was trapped on Sir W. Strickland's estate 

 at Boynton, near Bridlington.* 



Suffolk and Norfolk, which, strange to nay, had hardly 

 been mentioned by authors down to the present century, 



* 'Handbk. Yorksliiie Vertebrates,' pp. 65-68. 



