BIRDS 233 



moors and mosses of Westmorland. It is therefore probable 

 that, in spite of the silence of contemporary witnesses, local 

 tradition may be right in asserting, as it undoubtedly does, that 

 a few Geese used to breed in the wild country about the head- 

 waters of the Eden in Westmorland. Yarrell wrote of the Bean 

 Goose in the first edition of his British Birds, published in 1843 : 

 ' A few pairs, it is said, breed annually in Sunbiggin Tarn, near 

 Orton in Westmorland.' 1 There can be no doubt that this 

 statement should have referred to the Grey Lag Goose and not 

 to the Bean Goose. 



Dr. Gough included the ' Grey-legged Goose (Anser palustris) ' 

 as an occasional winter visitant to the Kendal district in 1861. 

 A few years afterwards he informed Mr. A. G. More that the 

 Grey Lag Goose had ceased to breed in Westmorland. Sun- 

 biggin Tarn is a lonely sheet of water, lying in a hollow of the 

 wild moors beneath Orton Scar; there the Grey Lag Goose 

 probably bred on islands which, as the tarn has filled up, are no 

 longer distinct from the sedge and bogbean with which they 

 have become closely incorporated. As lately as July last, two 

 local farmers separately told- me that Wild Geese visit the tarn 

 in winter ; nor could there be any doubt about it, for one had 

 shot a couple, and the other a single bird. The description 

 given by one of them pointed to the Grey Lag, as he emphasised 

 the blue shoulders. The same man, a native of Asby, had ' heard 

 tell of a Goose's nest being found on Eamont. 



But admitting that Yarrell was right in saying that a few 

 Geese really bred beside this lonely tarn prior to 1843, there 

 can be no doubt that T. C. Heysham considered the Grey Lag 

 Goose a rare bird in Cumberland. He says, in a draft of a 

 letter to B. Greenwell, dated June 11, 1840 : 'I have also at 

 present some doubt as to whether the bird you call the Grey 

 Lag Goose is really this species, not having seen one in this 

 neighbourhood for many years.' The birds obtained by Green- 

 well turned out to be Bean Geese, as I heard from his own 

 lips many years later. In another draft, T. C. Heysham spoke 

 of a local ' Grey Lag ' ; but it was by an inadvertence, for he 

 crossed his pen through it, and wrote above, 'Bean Goose.' 

 1 British Birds, 1st ed. vol. iii. p. 61. 



