Great Bustard. 355 



the keeper at West Lavington often told him that when a boy, 

 as he was on the downs with his father and the dogs, they came 

 upon a young Bustard which he caught ; but as it was only partly 

 grown, his father made him put it down again, saying it would 

 be better worth taking in a fortnight, at the end of which time 

 they came up again, found, and took it. This shows the wildness 

 of the downs at that time, but little of them being cultivated. 

 Again, the father of the late Rev. R Ashe, of Langley Burrell 

 was riding in 1806 from Broad Hinton to Chisledon, when he 

 rode down what he then conjectured, and afterwards ascertained, 

 to be a young Bustard : having farther to go, he got off his 

 horse, and tied its feet with a pocket-handkerchief, and left it in 

 a hole in a ploughed field; but on his return, to his chagrin, 

 both the bird and handkerchief were missing. Another Bustard 

 was killed in the early part of the present century at Langley, 

 and came into the fine collection of Mr. Warriner of Conock. 

 This Wiltshire specimen, and a very fine one it is, may be seen 

 with the rest of the collection, deposited in the Museum at 

 Devizes. In 1802 Colonel Montagu, in his 'Dictionary of British 

 Birds,' observed that the Bustard is only found upon the large 

 extensive plains, and that the species is almost extinct, except 

 upon those of Wiltshire, where they had become very scarce 

 within these few years/ In 1812, the editor of the last edition 

 of Pennant says, ' The breed is now nearly extirpated, except on 

 the Downs of Wiltshire, where it is also very scarce.' In the 

 same year, 1812, in the month of June or July, a flock of seven 

 was seen when he was a boy of nine or ten years of age, and on 

 his way from Salisbury to Great Bedwyn, by the Rev. W. 

 Quekett, Rector of Warrington, and whose graphic account I 

 printed in the seventeenth volume of the Wiltshire Magazine, 

 p. 127. After this I have no record with positive date on which 

 I can rely of any native Wiltshire Bustard ; but I have had many 

 statements to which I listened attentively, from thirty to forty 

 years ago, from old shepherds, farmers, and labourers, several of 

 whom could well recollect seeing these birds on the downs in 

 their early days, but from whom I could obtain no reliable in- 



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