22 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



sorts of wild fowls, which not only frequent it in the winter, 

 but breed there in the summer ; such as lapwings, snipes, 

 wild-ducks, and, as I have discovered within these few 

 years, teals. Partridges in vast plenty are bred in good 

 seasons on the verge of this forest, into which they love 

 to make excursions : and in particular, in the dry summer 

 of 1740 and 1741, and some years after, they swarmed to 

 such a degree that parties of unreasonable sportsmen killed 

 twenty and sometimes thirty brace in a day. 



But there was a nobler species of game in this forest, 

 now extinct, which I have heard old people say abounded 

 much before shooting flying became so common, and that 

 was the heath-cock, black-game, or grouse. When I was 

 a little boy I recollect one coming now and then to my 

 father's table. The last pack remembered was killed about 

 thirty-five years ago ; and within these ten years one solitary 

 grey hen was sprung by some beagles in beating for a hare. 

 The sportsmen cried out, " A hen pheasant ; " but a gentle- 

 man present, who had often seen grouse in the north of 

 England, assured me that it was a greyhen. 1 



1 With regard to the distribution of Black Game in the south of England, Mr. 

 Howard Saunders in his latest ' Manual ' writes as follows : " They are found, 

 in small numbers and locally, in Cornwall and South Devon, and are tolerably 

 plentiful on Exmoor, as well as on the Brendons and the Quantocks, in Somerset- 

 shire ; while they still maintain themselves in Dorset, Wilts, and the New Forest 

 district. In Sussex, Surrey, and Berkshire their presence is the result of reintro- 

 duction early in the present century, and none are now to be found in Kent, 

 where, however, the species existed in the time of Henry VIII. ; and it is in an 

 ordinance for the regulation of the royal household dated from Eltham that the 

 word 'Grouse' makes its first appearance in our language as 'Grows.' ("Man. 

 Brit. B., p. 493.) 



"This fine game-bird," writes Mr. Harting, "although it became extinct in 

 Gilbert White's day, was reintroduced after the planting of the wood by Sir 

 Charles Taylor, then ranger of the forest, and for some time throve exceedingly 

 well. The parent stock of the present race came from Cumberland, and in 1872 an 

 old man who had brought the birds to Wolmer was still living in the neighbouring 

 village of Liphook." (Ed. Selborne, p. 21, note.) Colonel Feilden, the naturalist 

 on the Alert in our last Polar expedition, and one of the most careful of modern 

 observers, contributed to the same edition an interesting experience of his visit to 

 Wolmer Forest in 1 872. He found there but few grey-hens, but estimated that there 

 were from forty to fifty black-cocks on the ground. He says : " If this polygamous 

 species is to be kept up, the proportion of sexes ought to be reversed ; as it now 



