XCVIIT. 

 NUMENIUS ARQUATA. (Lath. 



Common Curlew. 



I HAVE never traversed the lone wild heath, deserted, except 

 by the feathered race, and at a moment in which I have felt 

 the solitary dreariness of the scene, that the wild cry of the 

 Curlew, so much in accordance with all around me, has not 

 come like the voice of a companion to my ear, and produced 

 a silent feeling of gratitude to that Being who has thus adorned 

 with life and beauty the most sterile and least interesting of 

 his works ; and I have thought how great would be the void 

 in the creation, were we deprived of this single branch of his 

 glorious works. Upon such wild and deserted heaths, and 

 upon downs and open sheep-walks, especially in places which 

 are wet and marshy, the Curlew breeds; its nest, when any, 

 consists of a few pieces of dried grass, collected together in a 

 hollow, in some tuft of the same material ; the eggs are four 

 in number, and differ a good deal in the depth of the ground 

 colour, and also in the number of the spots. The two figures 

 represent two opposite varieties, those intermediate being 

 much more frequent; they are amazingly large when compared 

 Avith those of many other birds. 



Whilst in Norway, we were much amused with what ap- 

 peared to us to be quite a new and imnoticed habit in the 

 Grallatores, or Waders. One day, eagerly pursuing a bird of 

 this family, and having searched in vain a marsh, towards 

 which it had flown, we were about to relinquish the pursuit, 

 when much to our amazement we discovered it seated high 

 above our heads, on the lop of a tree : so contrary was this to 

 any of the habits of this class of birds with which we were 

 then acquainted, that we concluded that it must be a species 

 unknown to us. We afterwards found it, however, to be a 



