20 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



Elveden, and the Messrs. Gwilt, at Icklingham, others 

 permitted their persecution. George Turner, formerly 

 a gamekeeper at Wretham, and subsequently living at 

 Thetford, was suffered by the late Sir Robert Buxton, 

 Lord Comwallis (the latter owning the Culford estate, 

 in which was mcluded North Stow heath, already 

 spoken of as the " head place" for these birds) and 

 others, not only to go in quest of them with a swivel gun, 

 mounted on a wheelbarrow screened with boughs, a 

 parchment stalking horse, and similar devices,* but 

 even to construct masked batteries of large duck-guns, 

 placed so as to concentrate their fire upon a spot strewed 

 with turnips, and there is no question that first and last 

 he was the means of killing a very considerable number. 

 The guns forming his batteries had their triggers 

 attached to a cord perhaps half a mile long, and the 

 shepherds and other farm-labourers on the ground were 

 instructed by him to pull this cord whenever they saw the 

 bustards within range. A shepherd on the Place Farm, 

 at Thetford, of which Sir Robert Buxton was landlord, 

 has stated that on one occasion, about the year 1820, 

 he saw five or six bustards on the fatal spot, whereupon 



be made to go and look at the bustards, by those who visited at 

 the Duke of Grafton's, and other great houses in the neighbour- 

 hood of Thetford, and that a distant view of some of these birds 

 could always be obtained." 



* " There is an old blacksmith," writes Lord Lilford, " at 

 Shrewton, about half-way between Salisbury and Devizes, who well 

 remembers people coming from London to shoot bustards. They 

 used to drive round them in a cart gradually diminishing the circle, 

 and a good many were killed in that manner. The same method is 

 adopted in Spain and in the Danubian Principalities. I do not 

 think the bird was ever so abundant on Salisbury Plain as in 

 Norfolk, the largest number I could hear of, together, in the 

 former district was fourteen." The stalking-horse is mentioned by 

 the German ornithologists as a common means of getting within 

 shot of bustards. 



