STATUS OF THE SPOONBILL 177 
The Status of the Spoonbill.*—The former status of the 
Spoonbill in England presents a problem which, however con- 
sidered, must cause some regret for the loss of such a fine 
resident. There is besides the reflection that if the Spoonbill 
be lost, other good species, as for instance the Night-Heron, 
may have gone, of which we have now no knowledge. It 
is now well known that Spoonbills, or Shovellers (shouelard) 
as they were called, must have bred in heronries, or by them- 
selves, in some of the more southern English counties, a fact 
to which Mr. J. E. Harting was the first to draw public atten- 
tion. In addition to breeding in Sussex and Middlesex, as 
shown by Mr. Harting, and probably also in Kent, Spoonbills 
nested in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and doubt- 
less much later, in at least three spots in Norfolk (supra, p. 58), 
to which may be added Feltwell, where a fen on the Little 
Ouse was known as Poppylot.t Also we know that in the 
sixteenth century they bred somewhere near Hunstanton, 
as shown in the ninth chapter (swpra, p. 131), as well as at 
Claxton and Reedham on the Yare. In the seventeenth 
ventury we have it on the authority of Sir Thomas Browne 
_that there were Spoonbills at the mouth of the Orwell at 
Trimley in Suffolk. The position of all these places can be 
best explained by marking them on a map of Norfolk and 
Suffolk (p. 178). 
Again there is the best of reasons for believing, on the 
trustworthy evidence of George Owen, who lived in the Eliza- 
bethan age, that Spoonbills bred in at least one place in 
Wales, viz., in Pembrokeshire.t Turning to the legislation 
of the sixteenth century, there is a good deal to be elicited 
about Spoonbills, implying breeding in the _ provinces. 
First we have the Act of 1534 (supra, p. 167) in which a fine 
ot eightpence an egg is imposed on robbers of the nests of 
the Bittour, Heronne and Shouelard. As ‘‘ Shouelard”’ here 
* Platalea leucorodia, Lin. 
+ Professor Newton (Norwich Nat. Trans., Vol. VI., p. 159). The 
word ‘‘ Popeler’’ occurs at least three times as a surname in York- 
shire poll-tax returns of the fourteenth century (‘‘ Dictionary of English 
and Welsh Surnames”’ by C. Bardsley), which is not surprising, for not many 
names of birds have escaped usage among people at one time or another. 
ae Cymmrodorion Record Series,” p. 131. Iam indebted to the Editor 
for Part I. 
N 
