CHAPTER III 

 SOME FORGOTTEN EDIBLE BIRDS 



Scarcity of ruffs and reeves — Wheatears — Now unknown as table birds — 

 How ruffs were fattened — Bartailed godwit — " A bird of peculiar deli- 

 cacy " — The knot and its value — A mighty shot — Redshanks and 

 g'reenshanks — Dunlin — Curlew — Poor eating — Stints — The stone- 

 curlew — A South African relative— Golden plover — How identified 

 at table — The dotterel — Cranes and bitterns — Great bustard — a 

 notable bag — Fieldfares and their excellence— The water-rail, moor- 

 hen, and coot — Small birds patronised by our ancestors — Larks and 

 sentimentalists — How to cook larks. 



THE list of British birds which were formerly 

 esteemed as delicacies by our forefathers is, when 

 one begins to look into the matter, by no means an 

 inconsiderable one. Some of these birds, such as ruffs 

 and reeves, have fallen out of fashion owing to the 

 melancholy fact that they are nowadays no longer 

 attainable. The drainage of the fens and the advances 

 of cultivation have practically banished them from 

 these islands. In other cases the disappearance of 

 certain birds from modern cookery books and the 

 tables of gourmets and the well-to-do is not so easily 

 explainable. Wheatears, for example, had somehow 

 lost their high place in the estimation of bons vivants 

 for some time before the introduction of the Wild 

 Birds Protection Acts of the last twenty-three years. 

 Yet wheatears were, and still are, undoubtedly, a great 

 delicacy, well comparable, as they used to be, with the 

 ortolan of the Continent. Under their present blessed 

 state of immunity from capture, very few, indeed, of 



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