184 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
PLATALEA LEUCORODIA, Linnaeus. 
WHITE SPOONBILL. 
But for the most trustworthy records of Sir Thomas 
Browne, it would scarcely have been credited at the 
present time, that this remarkable species was for- 
merly a resident in East Anglia. This important fact, 
however, is preserved to us in the following passage 
from Sir Thomas’ notes on the “ Birds of Norfolk,” 
“The Platea or Shovelard,* which build upon the tops 
of high trees. They formerly built in the hernery at 
Claxtont and Reedham; now at Trimley, in Suffolk. 
They come in March, and are shot by fowlers, not for 
their meat, but for the handsomeness of the same; 
remarkable in their white colour, copped crown, and 
spoon or spatule like bill.” From so minute a descrip- 
tion of the species, there can be no doubt as to its 
identity, but even at that time (1688) it seems, through 
the persecution of the fowlers, they had ceased to breed 
in Norfolk, though still found at Trimley, in Suffolk, 
the “handsomeness” of their plumage rendering their 
destruction as certain as in more modern times. Pen- 
nant, whose most elaborate account of the spoonbill, 
* There is no doubt, as suggested by Mr. Lubbock, that the 
terms shovelard, sholarde, and shoveller, met with in the “ House- 
hold Books” and other early records of birds procured for culinary 
purposes, referred to this species and not, as supposed by some, 
to the shoveller duck (Anas clypeata), even though the latter is 
specially noticed by Sir Thomas Browne as “ Anas platyrhinchus, 
a remarkably broad-billed duck.’ In the Northumberland “ House- 
hold Book” we find the following entry :—‘‘ Sholardes to be hadde 
for my Lordes owne Mees at Pryncypall Feestes, and to be at 
vid. a pece,” being half the then price of bitterns and curlews. 
+ Seven and a-half miles from Norwich, near Buckenham 
Ferry, on the river Yare; and Reedham, nine miles from Yar- 
mouth on the same stream. 
