182 EARLY ANNALS OF ORNITHOLOGY 
The Status of the Bittern.*—That in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries the Bittern was diffused throughout the 
marshes of England, in its double capacity of a breeder 
and a winter visitant, admits of no doubt. And, moreover, 
that it continued to be common in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, we have abundant evidence in the 
literature of the period. The factor which has banished it 
from Britain was partly drainage, but still more fatal than 
drainage has becn the use of the gun. We should like to 
know rather more both of its English and Irish distribution, 
yet must not complain, seeing that there exists a history of it 
in the sixteenth century by a good ornithologist of that day, 
William Turner, who has left quite a considerable account 
as appears from Mr. A. H. Evans’s excellent translation of 
the “ Avium Praecipuarum . . . historia,’ from which the 
following extracts are quoted.t 
“ Stellaris,” says Turner, taking the name from Aristotle, 
“is that kind which Englishmen denominate buttour cr 
bittour, and the Germans call pittour or rosdom. Now it is 
a bird like other Herons in its state of body generall;, living 
by hunting fishes on the banks of swamps and rivers, very 
sluggish and most stupid, so that it can very easily be driven 
into nets by the use of a stalking horse.” This, however, 
was not by any means the employment to which a stalking 
horse was usually put in England. That Aristotle was aware 
of the Bittern’s sluggishness is indicated when he says: 
‘‘stellaris piger cognominata . . . . atque, ut cognomen 
sonat. iners ociosaque est.”” ‘*‘ So far as I remember,” continues 
Turner, it is nearly of the colour of a Pheasant and the beak 
is smeared with mud; it utters brayings like those of an ass. 
Of all birds it aims at men’s eyes most readily.” That it is a 
dangerous bird when wounded is well known, but that its beak 
should have been smeared with mud must have been an acci- 
dental circumstance in the examples which Turner cxamined. 
In another place in this valuable bird-book, when 
discussing the identity of Aristotle’s Onorrotalus, Turner 
returns again to the subject of ‘‘ the loud-sounding lacustrine 
* Botaurus stellaris (Lin.). 
t “Turner on Birds,” edited hy A. H. Evans, M.A., 1903, pp. xv. and 
41, 125, 127. 
