4o6 RECREATIONS OF A NATURALIST 



and on which he lavished large sums of money. 

 Kite-hawking, indeed, though an expensive amuse- 

 ment by reason of the value of the hawks employed, 

 was long practised by English falconers, even so late 

 as the first quarter of the present century, when the 

 Earl of Orford and Colonel Thornton of Thornville 

 Royal, with the members of the Falconers' Club, 

 used to "range for Kite near Elden Gap" and over 

 Thetford Warren. 



Monk's Wood and Alconbury Hill were then 

 the favourite haunts of this bird, and some interest- 

 ing testimony of its former abundance there is 

 afforded by Colonel Birch Reynardson in his 

 Reminiscences of a Gentleman Coachman (1875, 

 p. 74). He says : — 



" Within a few miles of Stilton, and between 

 Stilton and Stamford, is a hill called Alconbury 

 Hill. In the days I am writing of (about the year 

 1824, and from before that time to 1828 or 1829) 

 there used to be in that part of the country an 

 incredible number of Kites — the Fork-tailed Kite, 

 or what in Scotland were called Gleads, the red 

 feathers of whose forked tail were famous for wings 

 of salmon flies. These birds used to be soaring- 

 over the road and over a wood called Monk's 

 Wood. In almost every direction (when travelling 

 by the Stamford Regent coach) one used actually 

 to see them sitting in the middle of the road, and 

 on one occasion I remember counting as many as 

 twenty-seven in the air at the same time. The 

 preservation of game, I suppose, has got rid of 

 them, for no such bird is to be seen now ; and it is 



