GREAT BUSTARD. 1155) 
once more disappeared, and were not seen again until 
the frosts and snows of January brought them into the 
turnip-fields, and displayed them prominently to the 
observation of the shepherds and other field labourers. 
Mr. L. Sooby, formerly a tenant of Mr. Hamond’s at 
Gayton, is inclined to connect their appearance on a 
particular part of his land with the prevalence of a 
rather common weed, the “Owl’s crown” (Filago 
germanica, L.), which he said they used to eat ;* but 
this evidence rests entirely on that gentleman’s authority, 
as does also a statement that in the summer the evening 
was the time when they usually came forth to feed. In 
addition to this, he speaks very positively as to the fact 
that in the last days of the species the surviving hens 
used to scrape many more nest-holes in the ground than 
there were birds to occupy them, and on all sides it 
would appear that, if at that time a cock bird could 
have been procured from any other country and liberated 
in this locality, the species would have been preserved at 
least for a few years longer. 
The precise time at which the extinction of the 
Norfolk bustard took place, like that of the extinction 
of many other species, is not, perhaps, now to be deter- 
mined with accuracy. The year 1838 is the last when 
examples are known with certainty to have been killed ; 
* The food of this species in a wild state, as in confinement, 
appears to be somewhat varied, as Naumann specifies many 
different kinds of plants and other green food, together with 
beetles, mole-crickets,and grasshoppers. Selby states that, besides 
its usual diet of grain, seeds, and green corn with turnip-tops in 
winter, “it also eats worms, and has been known to devour mice 
and young birds, which are swallowed whole ;” and a still earlier 
authority, Willughby, writes, “It feeds on corn, seeds of herbs, 
colewort, dandelion leaves, &c. In the stomach of one dissected, 
we found a great quantity of hemlock seed, with three or four grains 
of barley, and that in harvest time.” 
