352 Struthionidce. 



'Kural Sports,' in the year 1800, recounts how Mr. Crouch, of 

 Burford, shot a hen Bustard on Salisbury Plain, with a common 

 fowling-piece and partridge-shot, at forty yards' distance ; and 

 adds that there were two other Bustards in company with the 

 one shot, neither of which appeared to be hurt. From this time, 

 however, the breed began to decline apace, and as cultivation 

 increased, and the Inclosure Acts came into force, and the downs 

 began to be broken up, and the waste lands to be reclaimed and 

 drained and, perhaps more than all, as the system of wheat- 

 hoeing in the spring became general the Bustards found it 

 more and more difficult to escape, and we hear only of stragglers 

 rarely encountered on the Wiltshire Downs. ' In 1801 ' (as 

 reported by Mr. Britton),* ' a man, about four o'clock of a fine 

 morning in June, was coming on horseback from Tinhead to 

 Tilshead, while at or near an inclosure called Asking's Penning, 

 one mile from, the village of Tilshead, he saw over his head, 

 about sixty yards high as near as he could estimate, a large bird, 

 which afterwards proved to be a Bustard. The bird alighted on 

 the ground immediately before the horse, which it indicated a 

 disposition to attack, and in fact very soon began the onset. 

 The man alighted, and getting hold of the bird, endeavoured to 

 secure it, and, after struggling with it nearly an hour, he suc- 

 ceeded, and brought it to Mr. J. Bartley, of Tilshead, to whose 

 house he was going. Not knowing the value of such a bird, he 

 offered it to Mr. Bartley as a present ; but Mr. Bartley declined 

 to accept it as such, though he much wished to have it ; and 

 after repeated solicitations, prevailed on the man to receive for 

 it a small sum, with which he was perfectly satisfied. During 

 the first week that Mr. Bartley had this bird in his possession, 

 it was not known to eat anything ; however, at length it became 

 very tame, and would at last receive its food from its patron's 

 hands, but still continued shy in the presence of strangers. Its 



* I make no scruple of reproducing in txtenso this most interesting account 

 of a Wiltshire Bustard, which was communicated by our own Mr. Britton to 

 Mr. Yarrell, and which that accomplished ornithologist read before the 

 Linnasan Society, in January, 1853, in a paper ' On the Habits and Structure 

 of the Great Bustard/ 



