208 ARDETD^. 



and I have heard my mother say that, before she married, 

 about the beginning of this century, she used to hear them 

 booming in the warrens and swamps of Manton and Twig- 

 moor in her afternoon rides from Scawby.' " As regards the 

 other eastern counties, many particulars of great interest will 

 be found in Mr. Stevenson's 'Birds of Norfolk.' The Bittern 

 has, naturally, been found more abundantly in the districts 

 best suited to its habits, but there is not a county in 

 England in which it has not been obtained at one time or 

 another. 



Before the drainage of the fens the Bittern was an annual 

 breeder with us, and even during the present century several 

 instances are on record. Graves, in his ' British Ornitho- 

 logy,' mentions a nest on the Cam, in 1821, which contained 

 four young birds and an addled egg. The Eev. W. B. 

 Stonehouse, writing in 1839, says, in ' The History and 

 Topography of the Isle of Axholme,' in Lincolnshire, " In 

 1817 I shot two Bitterns on Burringham Moor, opposite 

 Daddy thorpe, and on one occasion saw a nest containing 

 four eggs." Eyton, in his ' Fauna of Shropshire,' says a 

 hatch of these birds came off at Cosford Pool, near Nufnal, 

 in 1836 ; and during the same summer, and in the same 

 county, a pair of Bitterns bred at Tonglake, Albrighton, in 

 a reedy pond of half an acre, surrounded by bushes, about 

 half a mile from the Holyhead road ; two young birds, about 

 half grown, were caught by a farmer's boy. In 1849 or 

 1850, a nest containing four eggs was found at the Pieser- 

 voirs, near Tring, in Hertfordshire; and Capt. A. W. M. 

 Clark-Kennedy states on the authority of the Rev. Harper 

 Crewe that a nest and eggs were taken by Mr. Williams, of 

 Tring Park, and the female shot, near Drayton Beauchamp, 

 in Buckinghamshire (Zool. s.s. p. 1255).* Messrs. Sheppard 

 and Whitear, in their ' Catalogue of Norfolk and Suftblk 

 Birds,' state that they had once obtained an egg of this bird 

 in the marshes of Norfolk ; Lubbock, in his * Fauna of 

 Norfolk,' mentions several instances of the young of the 



* It is not improbable that these records relate to the same occurrence, as 

 Drajton Bcaucharap is close to Tring. 



