450 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
NOTES ON HERONBIES. 
By Rev. F. L. Buatawayr. 
LINCOLNSHIRE. 
In the list of British Heronries, printed in ‘ The Zoologist,’ 
1872, nine Lincolnshire colonies are mentioned, of which four at 
that time were extinct, two of doubtful existence, and three still 
inhabited. The extinct heronries were formerly situated at Leake 
near Boston, Spalding, Donington, and Cressy Hall, all in the 
south-east of the county. In Thompson’s ‘ History of Boston’ 
(1856) it is stated that the Herons at Leake built in numbers for 
a long time in a large tree, which was literally covered with 
nests. It was cut down about the year 1830. Pennant evidently 
informed Gilbert White of the Cressy Hall heronry, as we see 
from two of the Selborne naturalist’s letters written in 1769. 
This heronry appears to have been a very large one, as many 
as eighty nests being seen on one tree. Of the other heronries, 
one on Lord Yarborough’s estate at Manby, near Brigg, was on 
the decline in 1851, and apparently extinct by 1872, owing to the 
felling of the trees, while a heronry formerly situated in Muckton 
Wood, near Louth, seemed in 1872 to be of doubtful existence. 
The only inhabited heronries at the time the list was published 
were :—One in Skellingthorpe Wood, four miles west of Lincoln ; 
one at Swanpool (the ‘“‘Swanpool,’’ I presume, near the city 
boundary) ; and one at Haverholme, near Sleaford. 
In the fourth edition of Yarrell’s ‘ British Birds’ vol. iv. (1884— 
1885) this list is brought up to date, and we find that these last 
three heronries were still in existence, that at Haverholme con- 
sisting of forty pairs of birds, while the Manby heronry, thought 
to be extinct in 1872, is stated to have been reduced from thirty 
nests to seven in 1884. 
John Cordeaux, in his ‘ Birds of the Humber District,’ 1872, 
merely repeats the list from ‘The Zoologist’ (which appeared a 
few months earlier in the ‘Field’), and adds that a single nest 
was built on a tree in Nocton Park, near Lincoln; but in his 
“Revised List,” 1899, he states that the species still nests “‘in 
