BIRDS 229 



engineers who converted pools of standing water into valuable 

 corn-fields, soon banished the poor ' Miredrum ' from the ancient 

 home of its race, and forced it to seek a safer asylum in the 

 great reed beds of Denmark or the Dutch coast. Thence- 

 forward the Bittern was destined to return to Lakeland only 

 when the frosts of the Baltic urged it to seek for food and 

 shelter in our milder climate. Nor did it return to Lake- 

 land in the same abundance which more southern counties 

 experience. T. C. Heysham remarked that the occurrence of 

 eight Bitterns in the neighbourhood of the Solway, between 

 December 1831 and February 1832, was the more remarkable 

 because only a single specimen had been met with in the same 

 district during the previous ten or twelve years. Two of the 

 Bitterns in question were killed near Burgh, two near Brow- 

 houses, two in the Abbey Holme, one at Cumwhitton, and the 

 eighth at Hayton. Most probably these birds had arrived in 

 company. Dr. Gough, in recording the occurrence of four 

 Bitterns in the peat-mosses of Westmorland in December 1834, 

 offers the comment that ' Bitterns are by no means annual visi- 

 tors, nor is their appearance among us indicative at all of a severe 

 winter ; but when we are favoured with the company of this 

 bog- hunter, a flock of eight or ten is generally scattered over the 

 mosses and adjoining country.' We may safely infer that fifty 

 years ago the Bittern, when it visited Lakeland at all, appeared 

 in larger numbers than has been the case recently. My notes 

 embrace records of Bitterns killed nearly all over Lakeland, 

 from Selside and Cark to the Solway Firth ; but they only in- 

 clude one note of a Bittern killed in East Westmorland, viz., a 

 bird shot at Sandford Mire near Appleby in 1862. The greater 

 number have occurred within a short distance of the coast, 

 though a few must be accredited to the heart of the Lake dis- 

 trict, e.g., two birds shot at Esthwaite and Bampton in January 

 1867. The late Sam Watson of Carlisle told me that he stuffed 

 ten or twelve local examples of the Bittern during his long 

 practice as a taxidermist. One of these was shot in the Eden 

 near Bickerby in February 1865, by a keeper, who killed a 

 second Bittern in the same locality at daybreak on the 1st of 

 December 1868. The first-named bird had swallowed a water- 



