THE GREAT BUSTARD 



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and young lambs." A more damaging libel could not 

 well have been uttered, nor one better calculated to 

 raise man's hand against the bird. Although the 

 bustard may occasionally bolt mice or other small 

 animals, as, indeed, will farmyard turkeys and ducks, 

 to say that they will subsist upon flesh and young 

 lambs is singularly untrue. This remark may have 

 caused the death of many bustards just at the most 

 critical period of their nesting, it affording some excuse 

 for those who on seeing these huge birds in the vicinity 

 of their flocks would set to work to shoot, trap, or run 

 them down with sheep-dogs. The error doubtless arose 

 through this writer having mixed up the names bustard 

 and buzzard the latter being, as is now at all events 

 tolerably well known, a bird of prey, and no doubt it 

 was the bird reported to the worthy doctor as feeding 

 upon lambs. 



But other causes, far more powerful and irresistible 

 than the foregoing, have contributed to the banishment 

 of the bustard. The most important factor operating 

 towards this end was, in all probability, the inclosure 

 and cultivation of the land so extensively undertaken 

 at the close of the eighteenth century. At that time 

 large tracts of country were divided and laid out in 

 small fields ; thousands of acres of primeval waste, 

 common, or pasture-land the wild home of the bustard 

 and stone-curlew being then put under the plough. 

 Political events were entirely responsible for this hasty 

 transformation of the face of the country. Europe was 

 then in arms, and the price of wheat rising to nearly 

 5 per quarter (six guineas per quarter was obtained 

 for wheat some few years later) caused farmers to 

 plough up every available inch of pasture or waste 



