The Bean Goose. ^s 



cultivation and general enclosure, banislied tliem from their ancient haunts. 



Most of the old wild fowl shooters, who have long since gone over to the 

 majority, used to assert that these autumn flights fed regularly in the bean fields 

 as long as the old system of agriculture continued — a system m which quite 

 one-third of the cultivated land was under that crop. 



The late Mr. John Clubley, of Kilnsea, in Holderness, a most famous wild 

 fowl shooter in his day, told me that in his father's time all the district in south- 

 east Yorkshire, round Kilnsea and Kasington was unenclosed, and here and thei'e 

 many small ponds or " sypes," and birch trees, single or in groups. Great flocks 

 of Geese came in the fall and again in the spring, during bean harvest and 

 sowing, to feed ; but they ceased to come when ditches were cut and hedges 

 planted. 



In those days nearly every farm house in the marshes had a long single 

 barrelled gun, called the " goose-gun," originally a flint and steel, but afterwards 

 converted to a " tube and nipple," and subsequently cut down in the barrel to be 

 used for tenting purposes, when its use to the wild fowl shooter was no more. 



The Bean Goose is very partial to all sorts of grain, and, in this respect, 

 differs from the Grey Lag, whose chief food is grass. A local name is " Corn- 

 Goose," in France " Harvest- Goose," and in Transylvania it is known as the 

 " Growing- grain Goose"; it will, however, eat grass and clover as readily as its 

 congeners when the stubbles are exhausted. 



Mr. T. Southwell, (Stevenson's " Birds of Norfolk," vol. iii, p. 21), writing 

 on this species, says: — "whatever its former status in Norfolk, there can be, no 

 question that the Bean Goose (amongst the Grey Geese) now ranks, in point of 

 scarcity, next to the Grey Lag, as evidenced by the few examples observed in our 

 markets in late years, even in the most severe winters " — and subsequently he 

 enumerates four examples only as having come under his notice between January 

 loth, 1861, and January 31st, 1867, all these from the Norwich market. 



Mr. Haigh informs me that the Bean Goose is, at the present day, a regular 

 visitor, in very small numbers, to the coast and middle-marsh districts of Lincoln- 

 shire, but never to the wolds — the flocks are from half a dozen to fifteen birds — - 

 its food seems exclusively grain or young clover, and prefers grass which grows 

 in wet fields or fittie lands. 



The late Mr. Arthur Strickland, in a paper on " British Wild Geese," first 

 read before the Natural History Section of the British Association, at Leeds, in 

 1858, describes a long-billed Goose, which formerly frequented, and bred in the 

 carrs of Yorkshire. To this he gives the name of Anser paludosus — the " Carr Lag- 

 Goose." There can be no doubt, however, from the description and sketch, that 



