FEBRUARY 21 



ordinary booming cry on any fine night in May or 

 June. It is true that bitterns have never ceased to be 

 winter migrants to this country; but it is surely re- 

 markable that two should have met with a similar 

 accident in the same winter in counties so far apart as 

 Herts and Perthshire. 



The ghostly booming of the bittern has earned for it 

 a variety of names. Its full-dress ornithological title 

 is JBotaurus stellaris, and Pliny (lib. x. cap. 42) says 

 that in the neighbourhood of Aries the natives called the 

 bird taurus, a bull, because of its bellowing. In French 

 it is known as butor, cognate with our ' bittern ' ; but 

 it also goes by the provincial names of bceuf-d'eau, 

 taureau d'etang, etc. Among our own people it has 

 been variously termed ' bittour/ ' buttour,' ' mire 

 drornble,' ' butterboom/ and so forth, which may serve 

 to explain the pretty frequent occurrence in British 

 topography of such names as Butterhole, Butterwash, 

 etc., denoting places where the queer love-note of the 

 bittern was heard of yore. 



The fate of the two bitterns recorded above brings to 

 mind the quaint aphorism which Sir James Turner 

 placed on the title-page of his Pallas Armata, a treatise 

 on military tactics published in 1683 : Plures necat gula 

 quam gladius Gluttony claims more lives than the 

 sword. 



VII 



However cordially one may sympathise with the 

 motives and objects of the Humanitarian -rue Fur 

 League (and I, for one, earnestly wish them Seal 

 good speed in all reasonable effort to avert needless 



