GREY LAG GOOSE. 9 



grey geese in the flocks kept there, in comparison with 

 those kept in the more inland and upland parts of 

 Norfolk and the adjoining counties, which seemed to 

 indicate a later admixture with the wild race in the 

 Fen district than in those parts which are more distant 

 from the fen country. 



If the gozzard's occupation, however, is gone in our 

 fens, with all the attendant barbarities of plucking 

 the young and old indiscriminately, as described by 

 Pennant from personal observations in Lincolnshire,* 

 Norfolk still maintains its celebrity for poultry-rearing, 

 and especially for turkeys and geese. Besides the large 

 numbers reared annually in our farm-yards and fed up 

 to a certain period on our commons and waste grounds, 

 an immense number are reared in close vicinity to the 

 city by Mr. Bagshaw, of Magdalen-gates, Norwich, who 

 possesses almost a monopoly of the trade ; and this not 

 cnly at Christmas but throughout the year. From sta- 

 tistics recently supplied me, I find that this enterprising 

 speculator in poultry supplies in twelve months from 

 sixty thousand to seventy thousand birds, of which 

 some thirty thousand are ducks, but though at one 

 time he reared turkeys to a considerable extent, he 

 has of late paid attention chiefly to the fatting of 

 geese, the demand for them having greatly increased. 

 Besides those bred upon his own premises, the first pre- 



* In Gough's "Additions" to Camden's " Britannia," published 

 in 1789 (vol. ii., p. 235), the author, after quoting from Pennant's 

 " Tour in Scotland," to the effect that " a single man would keep 

 a thousand old geese in the fens, each of which would rear seven, 

 so that by the end of the season he would be master of eight 

 thousand birds," adds, " in North Holland they pull geese thrice a 

 year, and I have seen them on Wildmore Fen, between Tattersall 

 and Boston, raw with the plucking, and their legs and wings fre- 

 quently disjointed by rough hands, so that they fall an easy prey 

 to the crows." 



