12 NOTES ON CERTAIN BIRDS 



A sea fowl called a shearwater," somewhat billed like 

 a cormorant butt much lesser a strong & feirce fowle 

 houering about shipps when they [dense struck oui\ 

 cleanse their fish. 2 were kept 6 weekes craming them 

 with fish wch they would not feed on of themselues. the 

 seamen told mee they had kept them 3 weekes without 

 meat. & I giuing ouer to feed them found they liued 16 

 dayes without [any hin struck out] taking any thing. 



Barnacles^^ Brants Branta [wer struck out] are comon 



" Willughby's first acquaintance with the adult Manx Shearwater 

 ("Ornithology," p. 334) was from a drawing sent him by Sir T. Browne, 

 who describes the bird, as above, under the accepted name of Shearwater, 

 and Willughby's excellent figure on plate Ixvii. (which plate I believe is not 

 to be found in some copies of the " Ornithology," and to which there is no 

 reference in the text) has all the appearance of having been drawn from life. 

 The drawing here referred to is mentioned by Ray in his " Collection of 

 English Birds not generally known," as having been received, with others, 

 from the " learned and deservedly famous Sir Thomas Browne, of Norwich." 

 George Edwards (" Gleanings of Nat. Hist.," vii., p. 315), prior to 1764, 

 says that he went to the British Museum and examined Browne's "old 

 draught," but I could not find it among any of the papers I examined. In 

 Browne's fourth letter to Merrett, by an error in the transcription, he is made 

 by Wilkin to say that he kept twenty of these birds alive for five weeks ; 

 in the MS. it is clearly only two. 



^^ Barnacle and Brent Geese as we know them, the first by no means 

 common here ; the Wild Goose, probably Anser cinereus ; the Scotch 

 Goose (ste Note 9), probably the Gannet ; and the Bergander, an old 

 name for the Sheld-drake, as used by Turner in 1544, and derived from the 

 Dutch Berg-eende, German Bergente ("Diet. Birds," p. 835). Browne's 

 statement that this bird formerly bred about Northwold, or as it is even 

 now occasionally called by the natives, " Norrold," some twenty miles from 

 the sea; or, as he says, in the fourth letter to Merrett, "abounding in vast 

 and spatious commons," is very interesting, although not a solitary instance, 

 for I am informed that this bird breeds in the present day on the Gull 

 Lake, Twig Moor, in Lincolnshire ; but that it should have chosen such a 

 nesting site is not more surprising than the fact of the Ring Plover, quite as 

 strictly a marine species, frequenting the extensive sandy warrens about 

 Thetford and Brandon, near the centre of the county, for the same 

 purpose, as they still continue to do. But for Browne's mention of the 

 circumstance we should not have been aware of this singular departure 

 from the normal nesting habits of the Sheld-duck, as no tradition I believe 



