356 Struthionidce. 



formation as to date ; for the Wiltshire countryman, good honest 

 soul, is not observant of detail, and as to dates he ignores them 

 altogether; 'a long whiles ago' conveniently covering half a 

 century. However, by putting together the information I gained 

 from many sources, and by comparing the several statistics which 

 I thought reliable, I arrived at the opinion (perhaps somewhat 

 indistinct and hesitating) that our Wiltshire Bustard lingered on 

 till about the year 1820. I should add, however, that this is 

 somewhat later than the date of its extinction as given by 

 Montagu, who, in the Supplement to his Dictionary, published in 

 1813, says, ' We were informed by the shepherds that they had 

 not been seen for the last two or three years in their favourite 

 haunts on the Wiltshire Downs, where we had often con- 

 templated this bird with pleasure.' And Selby, in his ' Illustra- 

 tions of Ornithology/ published in 1825, 'unable on repeated 

 inquiry to hear of the reappearance of a single Bustard, since 

 the days of Montagu, even in its most favourite haunts/ pro- 

 nounces ' the breed to be extinct upon our extensive downs, of 

 which it once formed the appropriate ornament.' But Graves 

 (whose figure of the Great Bustard was drawn from a male bird 

 taken alive on Salisbury Plain in 1797, and kept for three years 

 in confinement, when it died) says in the third volume of his 

 'British Ornithology/ in 1821, 'The enclosing and cultivating 

 those extensive downs and heaths in various parts of Great 

 Britain, on which formerly this noble species was seen in large 

 flocks, threatens within a few years to extirpate the Bustard 

 from this country ; instead of being met with in flocks of forty or 

 fifty birds, it is a circumstance of rare occurrence that a single 

 individual is now seen/ 



Thus has this noble species, once so common in our county, 

 dwindled and died away, and now, alas ! is no more to be ac- 

 counted a resident throughout the kingdom. Like the American 

 Indian, the poor Bustard has had no chance against the march of 

 civilization, but has rapidly retired before the advancing plough- 

 share, till the race (once so free to rove over its vast and retired 

 solitudes as it listed) dwindled one by one, and the last survivor 



