62 BURROW-DUCK—BUSTARD 
BURROW-DUCK, a common local name of the SHELD-DRAKE. 
BUSTARD (corrupted from the Latin Avis tarda, though the 
application of the epithet! is not easily understood), the largest 
British land-fowl, and the Otis tarda of Linneus, which formerly 
frequented the champaign parts of Great Britain from East 
Lothian to Dorset, but of which the native race is now extirpated. 
Its existence in the northern locality just named rests upon 
Sibbald’s authority (circa 1684), and though Hector Boethius 
(1526) unmistakably described it as an inhabitant of the Merse, no 
later writer than the former has adduced any evidence in favour of 
its Scottish domicile. The last examples of the native race were 
probably two killed in 1838 near Swaffham, in Norfolk, a district 
in which for some years previously a few hen-birds of the species, 
the remnant of a plentiful stock, had maintained their existence, 
though no cock-bird had latterly been known to bear them 
company. In Suffolk, where the neighbourhood of Icklingham 
formed its chief haunt, an end came to the race in 1832; on the 
wolds of Yorkshire about 1826, or perhaps a little later; and on 
those of Lincolnshire about the same time. Of Wiltshire, Montagu, 
writing in 1813, says that none had been seen in their favourite 
haunts on Salisbury Plain for the last two or three years. In 
Dorset there is no evidence of an indigenous example having 
occurred since that date, nor in Hampshire nor Sussex within the 
present century. From other English counties, as Cambridgeshire, 
Hertfordshire, and Berkshire, it disappeared without note being 
taken of the event, and the direct cause or causes of its extermina- 
tion can only be inferred from what, on testimony cited by Mr. 
Stevenson (birds of Norfolk, 11. pp. 1-42), is known to have led 
to the same result in Norfolk and Suffolk. In the latter the 
extension of plantations rendered the country unfitted for a bird 
whose shy nature could not brook the growth of covert that might 
shelter a foe, and in the former the introduction of improved 
agricultural implements, notably the corn-drill and the horse-hoe, 
led to the discovery and generally the destruction of every nest, 
for the bird’s chosen breeding-place was in wide fields—“ brecks,” 
as they are locally called,—of winter-corn. Since the extirpation 
of the native race the Bustard is known to Great Britain only by 
occasional wanderers, straying most likely from the open country 
of Champagne or Saxony, and occurring in one part or another 
of the United Kingdom some two or three times every three or 
four years, and chiefly in midwinter. 
An adult male will measure nearly four feet from the tip of 
the bill to the end of the tail, and its wings have an expanse of 
1 Tt may be open to doubt whether fardais here an adjective. Several of the 
medieval naturalists used it as a substantive. 
