annie 
By the Rev. A. C. Smith. 133 
likely to be), at any rate by no means a rare bird, but indigenous 
to our downs; and doubtless highly prized by our sporting fore- 
fathers, was this pride of Wiltshire, this stately denizen of our 
‘plains. But from this time the breed began to decline apace, and 
as cultivation increased, and the Enclosure Acts came into force, 
and the downs began to be broken up, and the waste lands to be 
reclaimed and drained, and, perhaps, more than all, as the system 
of wheat hoeing in the spring became general, the poor bustard 
had no chance, but, like the American Indian, rapidly retired 
before the advancing plough, till the race, (once so free to rove over 
its vast and retired solitudes as it listed), dwindled one by one, till 
the last survivor was no more; but the destruction of these rem- 
nants of the bustard family was not unrecorded; each bird as it fell 
a victim to the gun, the dog, or the snare, found a willing chroni- 
cler to record its death and his success; and even now there are 
a few people living, who recollect seeing them wild in their haunts 
on our downs, and many others who have often listened to their 
fathers’ account of them in their days, my own father-in-law in 
Norfolk, being perhaps the last person in the kingdom who ever 
fired into a flock of seven or eight of these birds: but before I pro- 
ceed to record the unpublished testimony of eye and ear witnesses, 
of its more recent occurrence in this county, I will first quote a 
very interesting paragraph, headed “The Bustard of Salisbury 
Plain,” which appeared in the Wiltshire Independent about two 
years since, and was afterwards copied into the Times.—< There 
are people now living in Wiltshire, who recollect the time when it 
was the custom of the Mayor of Salisbury, to have a bustard as a 
prominent dish at the annual inauguration feast; and these birds, 
once numerous on the wide and then uncultivated expanse of 
Salisbury Plain, could at length only be shot by means of a vehicle 
so covered with bushes and placed in their haunts, as to enable 
men therein concealed, to bring them down at a long range. For 
more than fifty years the Wiltshire bustard has been extinct, and 
the Mayor of Salisbury has been obliged to forego his yearly 
delicacy.” I do not know who was the writer of this curious and 
interesting fact, but he is incorrect in stating that the bustard has 
