62 B URRO W-D UCK—B USTARD 



BUEROW-DUCK, a common local name of the Sheld-drake. 



BUSTAED (corrupted from the Latin Avis tarda, though the 

 application of the epithet ^ is not easily understood), the largest 

 British land-fowl, and the Otis tarda of Linnaeus, which formerly 

 frequented the champaign parts of Great Britain from East 

 Lothian to Dorset, but of which the native race is now extirpated. 

 Its existence in the northern locality just named rests upon 

 Sibbald's authority {circa 1684), and though Hector Boethius 

 (1526) unmistakably described it as an inhabitant of the Merse, no 

 later writer than the former has adduced any evidence in favour of 

 its Scottish domicile. The last examples of the native race were 

 probably two killed in 1838 near Swaffham, in Norfolk, a district 

 in which for some years previously a few hen-birds of the species, 

 the remnant of a plentiful stock, had maintained their existence, 

 though no cock-bird had latterly been known to bear them 

 company. In Suffolk, where the neighbourhood of Icklingham 

 formed its chief haunt, an end came to the race in 1832 ; on the 

 wolds of Yorkshire about 1826, or perhaps a little later; and on 

 those of Lincolnshire about the same time. Of Wiltshire, Montagu, 

 writing in 1813, says that none had been seen in their favourite 

 haunts on Salisbury Plain for the last two or three years. In 

 Dorset there is no evidence of an indigenous example having 

 occurred since that date, nor in Hampshire nor Sussex within the 

 present century. From other English counties, as Cambridgeshire, 

 Hertfordshire, and Berkshire, it disappeared without note being 

 taken of the event, and the direct cause or causes of its extermina- 

 tion can only be inferred from what, on testimony cited by Mr. 

 Stevenson {Birds of Norfolk, ii. pp. 1-42), is known to have led 

 to the same result in Norfolk and Suffolk. In the latter the 

 extension of plantations rendered the country unfitted for a bird 

 whose shy nature could not brook the growth of covert that might 

 shelter a foe, and in the former the introduction of improved 

 agricultural implements, notably the corn-drill and the horse-hoe, 

 led to the discovery and generally the destruction of every nest, 

 for the bird's chosen breeding-place was in wide fields — "brecks," 

 as they are locally called, — of winter-corn. Since the extirpation 

 of the native race the Bustard is known to Great Britain only by 

 occasional wanderers, straying most likely from the open country 

 of Champagne or Saxony, and occurring in one part or another 

 of the United Kingdom some two or three times every three or 

 four years, and chiefly in midwinter. 



An adult male M-ill measure nearly four feet from the tip of 

 the bill to the end of the tail, and its wings have an expanse of 



^ It may be open to doubt wbetber tardaia here an adjective. Several of the 

 medieeval naturalists used it as a substantive. 



