18 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
celebrated as a habitat for it. George Edwards, in his 
“Natural History,” says that the subject of his plate of 
this bird, which bears date 1746, “‘was presented to me 
fresh and in fine order by Mr. Daniel Gwilt, of Milk- 
street, London, my much esteemed. friend and relation ;” 
and the Rev. Robert Gwilt, the present representative of 
that family, long seated at Icklingham, has lately been 
good enough to furnish the information that Edwards’s 
original drawing from a bird killed at that place is now 
in his possession. Yet it would seem that Icklingham 
was not the chief place of resort for bustards in that 
tract, since the testimony of all the oldest men of the 
neighbourhood, now or lately surviving, points to North 
Stow heath as the stronghold—though, in truth, the 
difference is but slight, for this last is in an adjoining 
parish. But no doubt the birds shifted their ground 
from place to place within the tract according to the 
supply of food. Tradition gives forty to thirty as the 
strength of the drove in the last century, and it does not 
appear to have much, if at all, diminished at the 
beginning of the present, for that estimate is confirmed 
by several of the eye-witnesses examined, one of whom 
peeping over a warren bank, at Elveden, as near as he 
could recollect about the year 1812, and just after 
harvest, saw quite close to him a drove which might 
have consisted of forty birds, “large and small,” which 
sat there preening their feathers. The evidence of 
another man, who, as a boy, was about that time or a 
little earlier, shepherd’s page at Barnham, where he 
caught a young bird alive, tends also to show that from 
of these birds were probably seen more than once, but at that time, 
the beginning of the present century, the country between Thetford 
and Brandon, and from thence southward to Mildenhall, was con- 
sidered the head-quarters of the great bustard in the counties of 
Norfolk and Suffolk.” 
