12 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



common course of nature, to say nothing of those caused 

 by occasional violent deaths : for, although Mr. Hamond 

 (following the example of his father before him) and 

 most of his neighbours allowed no molestation of the 

 bustards on their estates, yet there is little doubt that 

 every now and then one fell to the gun, or was caught 

 in the gin of a depredator, while the smaller proprietors 

 were by no means actuated by any feelings for the per- 

 petuation of the stock, and a few of the larger ones 

 occasionally wished to supply themselves or their friends 

 with specimens for their collections or even for edible 

 purposes.* Not a thought of the extermination of the 

 species seems to have passed through their minds. 

 Either they were entirely indifferent about the matter, 

 or else they believed that since, as long as they could 

 remember, there had always been bustards on their 

 brecks, therefore bustards there would always be. Several 

 of the specimens thus obtained still exist in various 

 collections, and an enumeration of them with all the 

 particulars of their history, now to be obtained, will 



* The late Mr. Birkbeck informed Mr. J. H. Grurney that he 

 remembered on one occasion a West Norfolk friend sending a 

 young bustard to his father as a present for the table, showing that 

 they were occasionally so used in West Norfolk, as late as the end of 

 the last or beginning of the present century. The late Col. Hamilton, 

 also, in his " Reminiscences of a Sportsman " (vol. i., p. 178), gives 

 an account of a bustard, which he had been invited to dine off some 

 fifty years ago by the late Mr. Hyde, of Lexham Hall. It had been 

 shot, it appears, by a tenant of Mr. Hyde's, who, when riding up a 

 lane with his gun and a terrier dog, saw a large bird fly across 

 about twenty yards before him. He shot at and winged it, but, on 

 recovering itself, the bird ran so fast that but for his terrier which 

 seized and held it till he came up, it must have escaped. "It 

 proved," says the colonel, " an excellent bird, and the breast was of 

 two colours, brown and white." Mr. Newcome says that when 

 Mr. Colquhoun lived at Wretham, it was reported that there was 

 generally a bustard or two hanging up in the larder. 



