STONE -CUELEW. 143 



under the plough, and from enquiries made in the neighbour- 

 hood the bird seems to be now unknoTvm. The Stone-Curlew 

 undoubtedly bred at one time in Mid-Oxon, the Rev. A. and 

 H. Matthews including it in their list as a summer visitor, 

 and giving the date of its arrival as from the second to the 

 fourth week in May, and of its departure the first to the 

 third week in September. The former gentleman also wrote 

 me word that (previously to his leaving the county in 1 854) it 

 bred regularly in their own parish, Weston-on-the-Green. 

 The Stone-Curlew formerly also bred annually in the wide, 

 stony, arable fields on the hill above Sarsden, near Chipping 

 Norton. In 1887, old keeper Cook, of Kingham, then over 

 eighty, remarked to me in conversation, that we had no 

 'Curloos' now, and stated that when he lived at Sarsden, 

 fifty years ago, they came regularly and bred in these fields. 

 He described the birds very accurately, saying they were very 

 noisy at night, and could run very fast, much faster than 

 a Pheasant, and laid two eggs, which were very hard to find, 

 on the bare fallow, with perhaps a few blades of squitch-grass 

 {Triticum repens) gathered together round them. A few pairs 

 still breed on the wide arable fields on the western slope of 

 the Chilterns, north of Goring. In 1886 two broods of 

 young were discovered there on the iith May, and on the 

 26th a nest containing eggs was found in the same locality. 

 The birds were observed in the same spot the year following, 

 and it is believed that they breed there annually. (H. Evelyn 

 Rawson in lit?) 



Occasionally specimens are procured in other parts of the 

 county ; as, for instance, one at Tangley some ten years ago, 

 and another, now in my possession, at Great Bourton in May, 

 1871. 



