EED-LEGGED PAETEIDGE. 



405 



as a game bird are not found to answer tlie expecta- 

 tions of its importers in the exact way they anticipated. 

 Its introduction into the Eastern Counties dates only 

 from the close of the last century, when, about 

 the year 1770, the Marquis of Hertford and Lord 

 Eendlesham are recorded"^ to have had large quantities 

 of eggs imported from the continent, and the young 

 birds, hatched under domestic fowls, were turned off 

 at Sudbourn and Eendlesham, in Suffolk, on the 

 respective estates of the above noblemen. From thence 

 they soon spread to other portions of the county, and 

 the adjoining parts of Norfolk ; and in Daniel's " Sural 

 Sports" we find the author speaking of a covey of 

 foui^teen, discovered by himself in 1777 within two miles 

 of Colchester, which, in a very thick piece of turnips, 

 "baffled for half an hour the exertions of a brace of 

 good pointers to make them take wing, and the first 

 which did so immediately perched on the hedge, and 

 was shot in that situation without its being known what 

 bird it was." Others are also described by the same 

 writer as having been killed in 1799, at Sudbourn,t 

 where they were originally turned off. During the 



* See an article by Dr. W. B. Clarke, of Ipswich, in Charles- 

 worth's " Magazine of Natural History" for 1839 (p. 142). In this 

 paper, which contains a most accurate description of the habits of 

 the red-legged species, the date of its introduction by the Marquis 

 of Hertford is given as about the year 1790, but, judging from 

 other records, it most probably occurred from fifteen to twenty 

 years before. 



t I am not aware that any specimens of the Barbary partridge 

 (Perdw petrosa) have ever been met with in this county, but 

 Yarrell, who includes it amongst his "British Birds," states 

 that "two or three years ago, a bu-d of this species was shot by a 

 nobleman when sporting on the estate of the Marquis of Hertford, 

 at Sudbourn, in Sufi^olk, where it was considered that a few of the 

 eggs of the Barbary partridge had been introduced with a much 

 larger quantity of those of the more common red-legged bird." 



