ARDEA STELLARIS. 



(The Common Bittern.) 



Common formerly, but not now. Pishey Thompson, in his ' Hist, of Boston,' 

 p. 676, says : — " We well remember hearing that singular and solitary bird, 

 the Bittern, which the country people used to call the butter-bump, uttering 

 its melancholy ' booming ' from the low reedy parts of the then unenclosed 

 ings, or open meadows, of this neighbourhood." Now " we might almost 

 as soon expect to find a Bustard on Lincoln Heath as a Bittern in the Fen 

 district of Holland." About 1812, a gentleman staying at Priory Hill, St. 

 Neots, shot Bitterns right and left in my father's holts. Since that day, 

 though a stray one was captured alive on St. Neots Common in the winter of 

 1849-50, the Bittern, like the otter, has ceased to inhabit that part. Though 

 not belonging to the subject, I may say that otters abounded in the Hunt- 

 ingdonshire Ouse, particularly in the holts and islands round St. Neots Mills. 

 About 1809 a keeper, and my informant, found a female otter and cubs on 

 one of them. She bravely ran at them with her mouth open, but was shot. 

 The cubs were taken home and kept. Young ones were often found in bow- 

 nets ; it was common at night to hear their cries : they bred in the old 

 pollards, which grew then over these holts. Persons used to come for a 

 fortnight in boats to shoot Wild Geese ; the barge-horses often stuck in the 

 mud, and the boys were washed off their backs and drowned. The islands 

 were much lower in the water formerly, and boats went all over them. The 

 above were probably the last otters bred in the St. Neots holts. When the 

 holts are cut, with sharp points sticking up about a foot high, and the little 

 drains are quite blind, it requires some practice not to lame yourself, on the 

 one hand, or tumble into a ditch on the other. Yet a man who is accus- 

 tomed to the locality will run across easily enough. He might here set 

 at defiance a whole regiment of foreign invaders by swimming from island 

 to island ; and their chance of catching the native would be small. 



