CRANE. 125 
molluses and crustaceans. With such a diet one would 
scarcely expect to find them any great delicacy for the 
table, but Mr. Dowell, who has eaten them, describes the 
flesh as “fairly good”; and in by-gone days, when 
sea-gulls formed part of the bill of fare, oyster-catchers 
would seem, also, to have been much esteemed. In the 
* Northumberland Household Book ” we find the follow- 
ing order, “Item See-Pyes for my Lorde at Princypall 
Feestes and non other tyme;” but abundant as they 
must have been in former times on the Hunstanton 
beach, this species occurs but once in the “ L’Estrange 
Accounts,” viz., “The xxxvijth weke,” 1525, “It. pd 
to Nicholas Grey for a sepye, a redshancke, and a 
stynte, ij4-” 
CRUS CINEREA, Bechst. 
CRANE. 
That the Crane formerly bred in England, the terms 
of an Act of Parliament, passed in 1535, and already 
quoted in the account of the bustard (p. 11) leaves no 
room for doubt, as the fine of twenty-pence was thereby 
imposed upon every person who should ‘ withdraw, 
purloin, take, destroy, or convey,” any egg of this 
species. But whether the crane ever bred in Norfolk 
must remain an open question. Turner, a few years 
later, says (“Avium Historia, Colonie: 1548), that 
“earum pipiones ipse sepissime vidi; and as Turner, 
though a Northumbrian by birth, was educated and lived 
for nearly fifteen years at Cambridge,* it seems not 
unlikely that his personal acquaintance with the “‘pipers”’ 
* Cooper’s “ Athenz Cantabrigienses,” vol. 1., pp. 206-258. 
