192 THE BIRDS OF SHERWOOD FOREST. 
My notices of the next six or seven birds are very 
meagre, for they are mostly stragglers in our dis- 
trict, and some indeed but occasional visitors to our 
shores. 
I have notes of the Bittern (Ardea stellaris) occurring 
on four occasions ; one in 1846, shot in a willow holt on 
the banks of the Trent, near Nottingham, a second in 
the next garden but one to my own in 1853, a third on 
the water at Carburton in 1863, and a fourth in a boggy 
place on the margin of a small stream in Welbeck Park 
in 1866. We have few, if any, haunts suitable for the 
permanent residence of this handsome bird, and indeed, 
throughout the country there are comparatively few 
spots where now can be heard what Scott graphically 
calls 
“The bittern’s sounding drum, 
Booming from the sedgy shallow,” 
and they are yearly becoming scarcer. The bird I have 
mentioned as killed near my garden was shot in mid- 
winter, during a long and hard frost, and was little more 
than skin and bone. It had fared badly indeed, and 
had lost its fear of man, for it made no attempt to 
escape when perceived by the person who shot it. 
A few specimens of the Curlew (Vumenius arquata) 
are occasionally seen on Inkersal Forest during the time 
of their vernal migration, but I am not aware of their 
breeding there; I have also seen a solitary one on the 
edge of the lake at Thoresby. Every spring small par- 
ties may be seen in the daytime passing high over head 
on their way to their breeding places on the Yorkshire 
moors; oftener at night I have heard their well-known 
clear shrill whistle, uttered by cne of a party when it 
has been too dark to see them, and in a few seconds the 
