46 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



tliroug'h an early commencement of frost and snow ; 

 tlie more usual time of their appearance extending 

 from January to March. So much, however, do their 

 numbers depend upon the severity and duration of 

 frosty weather, that a record of severe winters will as 

 surely furnish a list of great swan years. 



Selby, in his " British Ornithology," speaks of their 

 abundance in 1784-85 and in 1788-89, and states that, 

 "in the winters of 1813,^ 1814, 1819, 1823, 1828, and 

 1829, all more or less severe, they were very commonly 

 met with in different parts of England. Messrs. Shep- 

 pard and Whitear, specially refer to the abundance of 

 whoopers on our eastern coast in the hard weather of 

 1819, and according to the Rev. W. B. Daniel ("Rural 

 Sports/' vol. iii., p. 302), « in the winter of 1803, there 

 were numbers of wild swans in the neighbourhood of 

 Yarmouth, in Norfolk. Seventeen were shot by a man 

 in the course of one week." Again in the severe winter 

 of 1838, the number of wild swans, even in the south of 

 England, is noticed by Yarrell, and by Colonel Hawker 

 in his "Instructions to young Sportsmen." In the 

 winter of 1843-44, as Mr. Southwell informs me, they 

 were pretty numerous about the shores of the " Wash" 

 and in the same locality, in the winter of 1849-50, were 

 so common as to be hawked about the streets of Lynn 

 by the gunners and fishermen. From that date, my 

 own notes supply records of but three or four winters 

 worthy to be termed swan years, although stragglers 

 of this species occur in most seasons. 



In 1854-55, a long and hard winter, when wild fowl 

 of all kinds were extremely abundant, I saw upwards 

 of twenty whoopers, that had been killed on our coast 

 or inland waters, but all of them between January 



* In the winter of 1813, he says, on the authority of Mi'. Cooke, 

 sixty wild swans were exhibited for sale in London, on one day. 



