Sub-order OTIDES. 



Family OTIDID^. 



THE GREAT BUSTARD. 

 OHs tarda, Linnaeus. 

 Plate 6o. 



By rights the Crane ought to have followed the Coot in this work instead of 

 the Great Bustard, but in order to allow a whole plate for this magnificent species, 

 now, alas ! no longer found in our islands, except occasionally as a rare straggler 

 from the Continent of Europe, I have thought it best to give its picture as a 

 frontispiece to the third volume. 



Formerly the Great Bustard, the largest of our land-birds, inhabited open 

 country in many parts of England, and also the Merse in south-eastern Scotland. 

 Writing in 1770, Gilbert White mentions that "there are Bustards on the wide 

 downs near Brighthelmstone " (Brighton), and noticed they looked like fallow deer 

 at a distance ; and the late Mr. Borrer in his Birds of Sussex stated that his father 

 had come across a flock — or " drove," as they used to be called in Norfolk — of 

 nine birds in a turnip-field when riding on these downs about 18 10. Salisbury 

 Plain was another of their well-known haunts up to the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, and on the Yorkshire wolds they survived until about 1832, while their 

 latest stronghold in England was in Suffolk and Norfolk. 



The last nest in Suffolk, according to Stevenson's Birds of Norfolk, was found 

 on the borders of Thetford Warren in 1832, and the last bird in this county was 

 observed on Icklingham Heath the same year. Some females lingered on for some 

 time longer in Norfolk, where the only survivors were killed in 1838, completing 

 the tragic history of the Bustard as an indigenous British bird. 



The new system of farming which came in some time before the extinction of 

 this fine species no doubt hastened its end, as the hens in later years usually laid 

 their eggs in the young corn, thus exposing them to the danger of being broken 

 or carried away by the labourers during the process of cleaning and weeding the 

 land. 



The Bustard is still found in some numbers on the plains of Europe, from 



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