58 BIRDS OF NORFOLK. 



CYGNUS OLOR (Gmelin). 



MUTE SWAN. 



If we regard this bird merely as an acclimatised 

 species, still the remote period of its introduction into 

 this country, and its independent habits, even under 

 the protection of man, fully entitle it, as in the case 

 of the pheasant,* to a place in the list of "British 

 Birds ;" and this, quite apart from the probability that 

 stragglers may, at times, reach our shores from those 

 Northern and Eastern portions of Europe in which it is 

 said to be found in a wild state. f The fact, however, 



* It is most probable that both the mute swan and the pheasant 

 were introduced into this country by the Romans. That such was 

 the case as regards the latter seems conclusively proved by the 

 most ancient record of its occurrence in Great Britain namely, 

 the tract " De inventione Sanctae Crucis Nostrae in Monte Acuto 

 et de ductione ejusdem apud Waltham," edited from MSS. in the 

 British Museum, by Professor Stubbs, and published in 1861. Mr. 

 W. Boyd Dawkins, who first drew the attention of naturalists to this 

 document in a letter to the " Ibis" for 1869, p. 358, quotes from 

 the " bill of fare drawn up by Harold for the Canons' households 

 of from six to seven persons, A.D. 1059, and preserved in a MS. of 

 the date of circa 1177," in which the pheasant is included amongst 

 other prescribed articles of food, and remarks, " now the point of 

 this passage is that it shows that Phasianus colchicus, had become 

 naturalized in England before the Norman invasion ; and as the 

 English and Danes were not the introducers of strange animals 

 in any well authenticated case, it offers fair presumptive evidence 

 that it was introduced by the Roman conquerors, who naturalized 

 the Fallow Deer in Britain." 



f Yarrell states that the mute swan " is found wild in Russia 

 and Siberia," and that Russian naturalists "include it among 

 the birds found in the countries between the Black and Caspian 

 Seas." By a review of the Vienna " Jagd-Zeitung," for 1864, 

 published in the " Ibis " (1865, p. 225), it appears that Her Johan 

 Zelebor, a conservator of the Imperial and Royal Museum at 

 Vienna, in an expedition to the Theiss and lower Danube, in 1863 



