16 
"captured, before it was enabled to take flight, but, when it did fly, 
it is reported not to have alighted again within a distance of seven 
or eight miles. Young ones, too, were frequently taken by sheep 
dogs upon the downs before they were capable of flight, and the 
eggs were eagerly songht after, half a guinez being no unusual 
price for a single egg, The flesh, too, was held in high esteem, 
and in 1771 it was perhaps the more so, because it was not so very 
easy to come at. The male bird, but rot the female, has a peculiar 
formation called a ‘julor pouch,’ in which it can take and retain, 
as much as seven pints of water. This is assumed to be for its 
own consumption in places distant from water, and by some it has 
been supposed to be for the purpose of supplying the female bird 
with water when she is sitting. It is, however, doubtful whether 
the bustard requires water at all, and the theory of its supplying 
the female bird when she is sitting is probably erroneous, for it is 
believed that when the cock bird has performed the portion 
allotted him by nature he leaves the hen to bring up her little 
family (of three or two, for the bustard lays not more than three 
eggs, and more usually only two) without any assistance from him, 
and, like our turkeys of the present day, he is not admitted into 
the society of the female after she has once begun to lay her eggs, 
Mr. Yarrell, in 1843, notes that a female bustard had been shot, a 
few days before, upon an open plain between Helston and the 
Lizard Point. He says it is the first instance of the capture of the 
Great Bustard in Cornwall, and the last instance known to us of the 
existence of this noble species in Great Britain. Thirteen years later, 
viz., in January, 1856, I became the owner, by purchase, of a genuine 
specimen of this bird, which was caught (as is recorded in the 2nd 
vol. of Yarrell’s ‘ British Birds’) by a little boy, who saw it at 
the edge of a turnip field, in the daytime, within a mile of the 
town of Hungerford, in Berkshire. The bird and the boy had a 
short fight, but the bird, having a broken leg, was worsted in the 
fray, and, being dragged along by its wing to a barn, was there 
killed. No other instance is known of a male bird (though I have 
ar indirect idea about a female) having been taken since my bird, 
till this last winter (again fifteen years since the former specimen 
was noted), when two were shot in Wiltshire, one male and the 
other female. Mr. Yarrell doubted, rather, the existence of the 
jular pouch, and he was very vexed with Mr. Leadbeater, who had 
my bird to preserve, that he did not give him an opportunity to 
examine the neck. I am told, however, as a fact, that.this pouch 
was very visible in the male bird shot this winter, and that it held 
six pints of water. The weight of the male birds seems to have 
varied from 28lbs. to 13$1bs., which was the weight of my bird ; 
that of the last one was 16lbs. The colour of the bird is a clay 
brown, the feathers being barred with black ; the head and the 
-upper part of the neck a greyish white, and ina full-grown male bird 
