110 



BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



kind. Of this, two curious instances occurred last year 

 (1867), as Mr. Gurney informs me — one at Mr. Henry 

 Birkbeck's at Stoke, and the other at Mr. Gurney 

 Buxton's at Catton, some lapwings, netted in the 

 Lincolnshire marshes having', in both places, been 

 turned into a walled-in garden. At Stoke, one of the 

 birds, not sufficiently pinioned, made its escape, but 

 instead of deserting its companions returned with others 

 of its own species ; and at Catton other wild specimens 

 joined the captives in the garden of their own accord. 

 As a proof of the occasional longevity of this species, 

 Mr. Barlow, of Bintree, records in the ^'Naturalist" 

 for 1853 (p. 82), the death through accident of a peewit, 

 which had been " fourteen years in captivity, in a walled- 

 in garden at Yarrow, the seat of Lady Townsend, in the 

 parish of Bintry, Norfolk." The habit attributed by 

 most authors to this species of attracting worms to the 

 surface by jarring the ground with their feet, is alto- 

 gether repudiated by Mudie,^ who takes much pains 

 to prove its impossibility, but the following anecdote, 

 given by the late Bishop Stanley in his "Familiar 

 History of Birds," seems strangely confirmatory of their 

 sagacity in this respect. A young lapwing in confine- 

 ment was supplied in addition to its common food, with 

 a few square pieces of turf six or seven inches in 

 thickness, on which were thrown a number of garden- 

 worms, which buried themselves in the sods ; care being 

 taken to keep them moist by waterings. " The lapwing, 

 when disposed for a meal, mounted one of these sods, 

 and, standing on one leg, kept regularly heating the turf 

 with the other.'* 



Varieties are not often met with, but Mr. Salmon 

 ("Mag. Nat. Hist.," 1836, p. 521), records the appear- 

 ance during two successive seasons, of a white specimen 



* " Feathered Tribes of the British Islands," 4th ed., vol. ii., p. 132. 



