Natural History. 89 



it kills hares by darting directly upon them.' * In the time of 

 James I. a great herd of red deer wandered over Hatfield 

 levels and the adjacent wastes of Lindholme, and in the 

 inquisition of 1607 it is said that the number amounted to 

 about 1,000 head, and that the herd is much impaired by 

 the depredations of the borderers. From a curious entry 

 preserved in the parish registers of Finningley in 1737, it is 

 probable that some of the herd remained down to the 

 commencement of the i8th century. 



In the first twenty years of the present century, ruffs and 

 reeves were common in all the maritime marshes in the north- 

 east of the county, and we have been assured by an old sports- 

 man that he used regularly to make excursions into the 

 Stallingborough and Immingham marshes in the spring to 

 shoot ruffs and dotterel ; a friend also recently told us that he 

 had heard his grandfather, who was a great shooter, talk of 

 seeing the bank between Glee and Tetney in the spring 

 covered with ruffs and reeves, and so tired with their long 

 flight that you might almost knock them down with a stick, 

 and that he could soon shoot as many as he could carry. 



On the same coast and salt-fitties at that time came 

 regularly to nest great numbers of oyster-catchers, Arctic, 

 common and lesser terns, and the ringed plover; the sheld-duck 

 also in the sandhills and warrens, and in the adjoining marsh 

 the hen harrier, spotted crake, ruffs and reeves, snipe, and 

 redshank ; still further inland, in the woods skirting the wolds, 

 the kite,f buzzard, and hobby. These were the days before 

 the gamekeeper and the trapper were known, and sportsmen 

 were well content with moderate bags, shot over dogs, and 

 with much healthy exercise. 



All testimony proves the former abundance of birds in 

 Lincolnshire, and we only know of one exception to this. 

 William Cobbett, who died in 1835, in his 'Rural Rides,' 

 which extended almost over the whole of England, coming to 

 Horncastle, says : ' There is one deficiency, and that with me 

 is a great one, throughout this county of corn and grass and 

 oxen and sheep that I have come over during the last three 



* In an old map MDCXXVI. of the Isle, before the drainage by Vermuyden, 

 Storkcarre's are marked between Haxey and Wroote, on the east bank of the river 

 Idle (Idille). 



f The eggs of the last kite recorded as nesting in Lincolnshire were taken from 

 a nest in Bullington Wood, near Wragby, in the spring of 1870. Since this time 

 ( it has only occurred as an immigrant passing south in the autumn, 



