WHIMBREL. 201 
baffles any imitation by the human voice.” This cry, 
however, according to Messrs. Sheppard and Whitear, 
resembles the sounds “ Weddy, tetty, tetty, tetty, tet,” 
quickly repeated. Mr. Cordeaux also (“ Zoologist,” s.s., 
p- 1283) states, from his observations in Lincolnshire, 
that they are “far more a land bird than the curlew, 
feeding almost exclusively in our marshes, retiring 
occasionally to the flats to rest and bathe;” being 
particularly fond of washing and splashing the water 
over their plumage with their wings. 
Whimbrels as well as curlews differ much in size, 
which, if a sexual distinction in the one, is the same 
no doubt, in both, and from the general similarity of 
the two species in other respects the whimbrel is 
provincially known by the name of the “ half-curlew.” 
Mr. Fenwick Hele, of Aldeburgh, who found the 
whimbrel very abundant on that part of the Suffolk 
coast in May, 1867 (“ Field,” vol. xxix., p. 389), states 
that he observed amongst them a light cream-coloured 
specimen. 
In my account of the common house-sparrow, in 
the first volume of this work, I ventured to assert that 
the late Bishop Stanley, in his “Familiar History 
of Birds,” was in error in supposing that the term 
spowes, so frequently occurring in the “ Household and 
Privy Purse Accounts” of the L’Estrange’s of Hun- 
stanton, referred to the sparrow,* although in one 
* A correspondent in “The East Anglian” (vol. iii., p. 266) signing 
himself “ Alpha,” in commenting upon some editorial remarks 
founded upon my reference to the “spowe,” in the first volume of 
this work, quotes the following passage (to prove that the sparrow 
was “a recognised article of food long anterior to the date of the 
Hunstanton Household Book’), from the “Boke of Nurture,” 
written by John Russell, Usher and Marshall to “good Duke 
Homphrey, of Gloucester,” between 1404 and 1447, as recently 
2D 
