50 BIRD LIFE THROUGHOUT THE YEAR 



wild-fowl which formerly made them their home. 

 True, the tide of disaster has sometimes turned when 

 the dykes have burst and the waters have for a time 

 reclaimed their own, but otherwise the remnants of 

 the marsh land have, in the opinion of the birds, 

 become year by year more unsuited to their require- 

 ments, and they have been driven to seek in Holland 

 or Jutland the congenial solitudes which our own land 

 now fails to provide. The times are indeed changed 

 since Sir Thomas Browne could sally out of Norwich 

 and return in a few hours with his pockets filled with 

 eggs of the crane and great-bustard ; when Fulham, 

 on the Thames was, as its name implies, the fowls' -home 

 where, amongst other wild-fowl, the spoonbills bred, 

 and when the fenman could count upon a bittern for 

 his Sunday's dinner. The booming of the Bittern — 

 one of the most weird sounds in nature — is no longer 

 heard, though with every spell of keen frost bitterns 

 from the Continent revisit the Welsh bogs, and show 

 such a tendency to linger till spring in favourite spots 

 in other parts of the country that it seems probable that, 

 if unmolested, an occasional pair would breed with us 

 even at the present day. But a century has elapsed 

 since the Grey Geese ceased to linger to nest in the 

 Lincolnshire fens, and nearly as long since the last 

 colony of noisy Avocets gave way before persecution, 

 though a stray specimen still crosses, not unfrequently, 

 from Holland, to scoop its food with flexible, upturned 



