12 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
common course of nature, to say nothing of those caused 
by occasional violent deaths: for, although Mr. Hamond 
(following the example of his father before him) and 
most of his neighbours allowed no molestation of the 
bustards on their estates, yet there is little doubt that 
every now and then one fell to the gun, or was caught 
in the gin of a depredator, while the smaller proprietors 
were by no means actuated by any feelings for the per- 
petuation of the stock, and a few of the larger ones 
occasionally wished to supply themselves or their friends 
with specimens for their collections or even for edible 
purposes.* Not a thought of the extermination of the 
species seems to have passed through their minds. 
Hither they were entirely indifferent about the matter, 
or else they believed that since, as long as they could 
remember, there had always been bustards on their 
brecks, therefore bustards there would always be. Several 
of the specimens thus obtained still exist in various 
collections, and an enumeration of them with all the 
particulars of their history, now to be obtained, will 
* The late Mr. Birkbeck informed Mr. J. H. Gurney that he 
remembered on one occasion a West Norfolk friend sending a 
young bustard to his father as a present for the table, showing that 
they were occasionally so used in West Norfolk, as late as the end of 
the last or beginning of the present century. The late Col. Hamilton, 
also, in his “ Reminiscences of a Sportsman” (vol. i., p. 178), gives 
an account of a bustard, which he had been invited to dine off some 
fifty years ago by the late Mr. Hyde, of Lexham Hall. It had been 
shot, it appears, by a tenant of Mr. Hyde’s, who, when riding up a 
lane with his gun and a terrier dog, saw a large bird fly across 
about twenty yards before him. He shot at and winged it, but, on 
recovering itself, the bird ran so fast that but for his terrier which 
seized and held it till he came up, it must have escaped. “It 
proved,” says the colonel, “an excellent bird, and the breast was of 
two colours, brown and white.’ Mr. Newcome says that when 
Mr. Colquhoun lived at Wretham, it was reported that there was 
generally a bustard or two hanging up in the larder. 
