326 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 
recently, as many have been shot on the opposite side of 
the river, about Brundall, Strumpshaw, and Buckenham; 
but this can only be effected by residents, shooting 
almost daily so long as any snipes are to be found.* 
The following are a few cases in which exceptional 
numbers have been killed in Norfolk, as recorded by 
local authors, or gleaned from the “hearsay” evidence 
of sporting friends :— 
The Messrs. Paget, in the introduction to their 
“Sketch,” state that in the winter of 1829, five 
hundred snipes, with a proportionate number of plover 
and wild fowl, were brought in to a Yarmouth game- 
dealer on one market day. A similarly remarkable 
occurrence is also given by Messrs. Gurney and Fisher 
in the Introduction to their “Birds of Norfolk,’ who 
state that on the 11th of December, 1844, five hundred 
snipes and eight hundred dunlins were brought to one 
dealer at Yarmouth; and on the 16th, two hundred 
dunlins and three hundred snipes. At Sutton, some 
eighteen years ago, Captain Rous killed over forty couples 
in one day to his own gun, and the marshman who was 
with him, merely taking the outskirts, killed fourteen 
couples. In the Langley and Buckenham marshes many 
years ago, when in fine condition, a single sportsman is 
said to have killed eighty couples to his own gun; and 
about five and twenty years back, I am told that 
Mr. Robert Fellowes killed seventy-nine couples in one 
day at Horsey. Somewhere about the year 1859 or 1860, 
and in the month of November, Mr. Dowell informs 
me that immense flights of snipes appeared on the 
* The marshmen are usually aware of the arrival of the snipes 
in any large quantities, and, communicating at once with some 
neighbouring sportsman, he stands a fair chance of making a bag 
the next morning. An individual, however, from a distance, who 
probably cannot obey the summons before the second day, in all 
probability finds that the snipes have shifted their quarters. 
