CIECUS ^RUGINOSUS. 71 



The Editor of the 4th edition of Yarrell gives a dreary Ust of the 

 counties in which Circus ceruginosus has ceased to be — those of Wales, 

 Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, and from Yorkshire 

 northwards ! 



We may lament these things ; but the remedy is not easy to provide. 



Mr. A. Anderson says (P. Z. S. 1872, p. 78, '' on the Raptorial Birds of 

 India '') it is " obtained in every variety of plumage, including a uniform 

 dark brown, nearly black, with pale fulvous nuchal spot. This variety 

 is extremely rare." 



This dress will perhaps never again be seen in England. 



The Rev. Richard Lubbock, in the 'Fauna of Norfolk,' 1845, p. 14, 

 relates a different state of things. The Marsh-Harrier " might, twenty years 

 back, have been termed the Norfolk Hawk ; it was so generally dispersed 

 among the broads. Almost any pool of any extent had its pair of these birds ; 

 they consumed the day in beating round and round the reeds which skirted the 

 water : this was done for hours, incessantly. All the birds wounded by the 

 sportsman fell to the share of the Moor-Buzzard; he was, as it were, the 

 genius loci, the sovereign of the waste. Sir T. Browne represents it as 

 occasionally carrying off the young of the otter to feed its nestlings with. In 

 decoys this is a most troublesome bird, keeping the fowl in such continual 

 restlessness that the decoy-man can do nothing with them." 



Again, p. 93 : — " Sir T. Browne notices the constant warfare of the 

 Moor-Buzzard with the Coots, which defend themselves by huddling into a 

 dense body and flinging up the water." 



Mr. R. Bowdler Sharpe, in the new edition of Layard's ' Birds of South 

 Africa,' part i. p. 16, says:— ''The Marsh-Harrier of Europe has only 

 recently been identified as an inhabitant of South Africa, and is doubtless 

 only an occasional visitant. A single specimen was procured by Mr. Ayres 



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