234 BIEDS OF NOEFOLK. 



few might be spared for this bird, the greatest ornament 

 of the Norfolk broads.' With so many and such 

 relentless enemies, the wonder is that a single loon 

 remains at the present time to grace our waters, than 

 that their numbers for the last twenty years should have 

 steadily but surely decreased.* Every spring, though 

 in smaller and smaller numbers, their eggs are 

 exhibited for sale in our markets, and the value of their 

 skins as ornamental trimming for ladies' dresses, ensures 

 the destruction of every unlucky bird that shows itself 

 within reach of a marshman's gun. The following note 

 by Mr. Strangways, of London, from the ' Zoologist ' for 

 1851, p. 3209, will probably enlighten the proprietors of 

 our broads as to the cause of the disappearance of so 

 many of these beautiful creatures from our reedy waters. 

 In the months of April and May last (he said) T collected 

 twenty-nine of these birds in full summer plumage, all 

 shot in Norfolk. Four of them I preserved, and they are 

 now in the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, where they 

 are exhibited by Messrs. Eobert Clarke and Sons, the 

 furriers, in class 18, to which they very appropriately 

 belong, as the breast of this bird has become a fashion- 

 able and very beautiful substitute for furs. The rest of 

 the skins I have had manufactured into ladies boas and 

 muffs, and may, perhaps, say they are the first British 

 specimens used for this purpose. The market for grebe 

 is chiefly supplied from southern Europe.' This fashion, 

 unfortunately, has by no means died out, and the demand 

 for skins being greater than the supply, as much as ten 



* Sir Thomas Browne thus refers to this bird, " Mergus 

 acutirostris speciosus or Loone, an handsome and specious fowle, 

 cristated, and with diuided finne feet, placed very backward, and 

 after the manner of all such which the Duch call Arsvoote, 

 they have a peculiar formation in the legge bone, which hath 

 a long and sharpe processe extending above the thigh bone. They 

 come about April, and breed in the broad waters, so making their 

 nest on the water, that theire egges are seldom drye, while they 

 are sett on." Graves, in his " British Ornithology " (2nd Edit., 

 1821), vol. iii., says, " on the extensive broads (as they ai'e termed) 

 in Norfolk and Suffolk they [the Great Crested Grebe] are 

 extremely common; we counted twenty- six, at one time, on Filby 

 Broad, near Yarmouth," — T. S, 



