GREAT BUSTARD. 115 



indeed, the whole of the Struihwnidae^ from their 

 form and habits, and large size, are marked objects, 

 and are a tribe of birds which have fled before the 

 inroads of population and agriculture. Abroad, 

 in many of the districts where the Emu and Ostrich 

 abounded in almost innumerable herds, they have 

 become extremely rare, and are either entirely extir- 

 pated or driven to seek more retired plains, and like 

 causes have, in a similar manner, reduced the num r 

 hers of our native Bustard to straggling instances of 

 their occurrence. In some few stations they seem 

 still to be preserved, and keep up a scanty stock, 

 from which, perhaps, may stray the occasional speci- 

 mens of whose capture we are generally made aware 

 through the public prints. 



Newmarket Heath and Salisbury Plain, Sussex 

 or South Downs, Royston Heath, &c., are well 

 known stations of old for these birds ; and Devon- 

 shire, Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suf- 

 folk, Lincolnshire, &c., are all mentioned as districts 

 where occasional specimens have been seen or pro- 

 cured. So late as 1819, Mr. Yarrell states, upon 

 " authority," that nineteen were observed together at 

 Westcape in Norfolk, where they are carefully pre- 

 served by the proprietor. In Scotland, we have very 

 few records of them. Sibbald seems to think they 

 appeared occasionally " unam non ita pridem in 

 Lothiana Orientali visam fuisse."* " One was shot 

 in 1803, in Morayshire, by William Young, Esq. of 

 Boroughhead."t Mr. Mudie, in his British Birds, 



* Prodromus ii. part 2. p. 17. t Yarrell ii. p. 367. 



