20 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
Elveden, and the Messrs. Gwilt, at Icklingham, others 
permitted their persecution. George Turner, formerly 
a gamekeeper at Wretham, and subsequently living at 
Thetford, was suffered by the late Sir Robert Buxton, 
Lord Cornwallis (the latter owning the Culford estate, 
in which was included North Stow heath, already 
spoken of as the “head place” for these birds) and 
others, not only to go in quest of them with a swivel gun, 
mounted on a wheelbarrow screened with boughs, a 
parchment stalking horse, and similar devices,* but 
even to construct masked batteries of large duck-guns, 
placed so as to concentrate their fire upon a spot strewed 
with turnips, and there is no question that first and last 
he was the means of killing a very considerable number. 
The guns forming his batteries had their triggers 
attached to a cord perhaps half a mile long, and the 
shepherds and other farm-labourers on the ground were 
instructed by him to pull this cord whenever they saw the 
bustards within range. A shepherd on the Place Farm, 
at Thetford, of which Sir Robert Buxton was landlord, 
has stated that on one occasion, about the year 1820, 
he saw five or six bustards on the fatal spot, whereupon 
be made to go and look at the bustards, by those who visited at 
the Duke of Grafton’s, and other great houses in the neighbour- 
hood of Thetford, and that a distant view of some of these birds 
could always be obtained.” 
* “There is an old blacksmith,’ writes Lord Lilford, “at 
Shrewton, about half-way between Salisbury and Devizes, who well 
remembers people coming from London to shoot bustards. They 
used to drive round them in a cart gradually diminishing the circle, 
and a good many were killed in that manner. The same method is 
adopted in Spain and in the Danubian Principalities. I do not 
think the bird was ever so abundant on Salisbury Plain as in 
Norfolk, the largest number I could hear of, together, in the 
former district was fourteen.” The stalking-horse is mentioned by 
the German ornithologists as a common means of getting within 
shot of bustards. 
