178 On the Occurrence of some of the Rarer Species of Birds 



of the sea " — a testimony which, if it needed any corroboration, 

 could find it still in the inexhaustible multitudes which are seen at 

 times in the south of Europe and other places around the Mediterra- 

 nean coast. Their egg- is very prettily mottled, and very similar 

 to that of the Spotted Crake, the latter only having rather larger 

 splotches upon it, and not being quite so rounded at the upper end. 



STETJTHIONIDiB. 



Otis Tarda. " The Great Bustard/' Had I been writing this 

 paper but a few years previously to the present time, it must have 

 consisted only of past reminiscences and bygone memories, as far as 

 the Bustard was concerned, with an apparently useless regret that 

 our celebrated " Plain " was to know it no more, although once it had 

 been one of this noble bird's chief strongholds amongst us. But 

 more recently, as most of my readers will be aware, the Great 

 Bustard has once more re-visited its old haunts on Salisbury Plain, 

 and has also been procured during the winter of 1879-80 from no 

 less than seven different places within the range of our islands. 



As is well known through tradition, Salisbury Plain was one of 

 the strongholds of this bird in former years : the large, open 

 undulating reaches of down, varied with patches at that day, of 

 cultivated land, affording it exactly the kind of haunt necessary to 

 its existence; the very grandeur of the appearance of the bird 

 declaring that it cannot brook to be "^ cribbed, cabined, and confined" 

 within enclosures, however spacious, which, besides being distasteful 

 to it in themselves, afford that vantage ground to its enemies to 

 creep upon it unobserved, of which it would seem intuitively afraid. 

 Of late years, indeed by the present generation you may say, the 

 Bustard has been looked upon as an extinct local species, surviving 

 amongst us only by tradition — as exemplified, for instance, in the 

 sign of the inn, in the middle of the plain, which bore a Bustard 

 on its escutcheon, thus testifying to its quondam frequency amongst 

 us — or as having been seen by one or two octogenarians possibly 

 still living, who having had an ornithological taste early developed 

 within them, might by some remote chance have actually remembered, 

 as boys, having once themselves caught sight of the great bird. 



