90 Lincolnshire Notes & Queries. 



weeks, the want of singing .birds. We are now just in the 

 season when they sing most. Here in all this country I have 

 seen and heard only about four skylarks, and not one other bird 

 of any description ; and of small birds that do not sing I have 

 seen only one yellow-hammer, and it was perched on the 

 rail of the pound between Boston and Sibsey.' Had he passed 

 through the same district in the autumn, when the great wave 

 of migration has set in, he would have probably written 

 differently, seeing the fields swarming with larks, chaffinches, 

 and buntings, the hedgerows alive with blackbirds, thrushes, 

 and redwings, and in the marshes, near the coast, immense 

 flocks of snow buntings, tree sparrows, linnets, and twites, as 

 well as hundreds of that characteristic bird of the county the 

 grey crow ; on the coast itself such flights of knot, godwit, 

 and grey plover as can be seen nowhere else in England. 



The fresh-water fisheries of Lincolnshire had a great 

 reputation, more especially for pike and eels j enormous 

 numbers of the latter were annually taken, and they formed 

 no small part of the tribute and endowments of the monasteries 

 and religious houses. The fen eels often grew to an enormous 

 size two are mentioned by Yarrell, taken in draining a fen 

 dike, near Wisbeach, one of which weighed 27 Ibs., the other 

 25 Ibs.* The pike is plentiful in the rivers and drains of the 

 fens ; there is an old adage which says 



Witham Pike 

 England has neen like ; 



and another, 



Ankholme eels and Witham Pike, 

 In all England are nane syke. 



The pike of the Witham, however, in the present day will 

 bear no comparison with the monsters of the old fen meres, as 

 we may judge from the jaws of this fish found in the peat and 

 preserved in the Cambridge Museum. In the collection of the 

 late Mr. Frank Buckland was a pike weighing over 100 Ibs., 

 taken when Whittlesea mere was drained. Valuable salmon 

 fisheries were worked at the beginning of this century on the 

 Humber. Sir Charles Anderson t states: 'In 1806, John 

 Barrick of Barrow, gamekeeper, stated that his father rented 

 the fishery of Barrow, and that thirty years ago he was present 

 at the taking of eighteen salmon in one tide, one weighed 47 



* We recently obtained one of four large eels, Angullla acutirottris, caught in a 

 trawl net at sea some miles east of Flamborough Head, 

 f The Lincoln Pocket Guide, p. 85. 



