TO 



JOHN CORDEAUX: LINCOLNSHIRE. 



from William of Malmesbury* and Camden,f and again more recently 

 in the writings of Gough,J Pennant, and Colonel Montagu. Drayton 

 also in quaint verse § describes the goodly fens and their teeming life. 

 These passages from old writers have frequently been quoted in 

 descriptions of fen scenery, and space will not permit us to do more 

 than allude to them in a general way. A glorious place in its wild 

 natural state was that old fenland before man had come in to bank 

 and drain, and a very paradise to the fowler and fisher were the 

 boggy flats where the ' dark -green alders, and pale-green reeds 

 stretched for miles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked 

 and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own 

 sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around, while high over- 

 head hung motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, 

 kite beyond kite, as far as the eye could see.'|| Some idea may be 

 formed of the enormous number of wild fowl frequenting the fens by 

 the facts as related by Pennant,^ that in one year from only ten decoys 

 near Wainfleet 31,200 ducks were sent to London. In these times a 

 flock of wild duck has been observed passing along from the north 

 and north-east into the east fen in a continuous stream for eight 

 hours together.** 



With the drainage of the fens the bird-life disappeared. Gone 

 now as habitual residents are the harriers and short-eared owls, the grey 

 geese and ducks, the cormorants, grebes, and divers, the bitterns, 

 cranes, spoonbills, and storks; gone also are the smaller fowl — the 

 black-tailed godwit, the avocets, ruffs and reeves, gulls and terns. ft 

 Vanished too has many a fen plant, as the great fen ragwort, the giant 

 cineraria and marsh sow-thistle, whilst others like the fragrant bog- 

 myrtle, water germander, and the marsh and royal ferns manage just 

 to retain a precarious footing, and are probably sooner or later 

 doomed to extinction ; and with the lost plants — and mainly perhaps 



* Temp. 1 100. 



+ Camden's Britannia, 1 Ed., 1695. 



\ Op. cit., Cough's Ed., 1806, Vol. II, pp. 380-1. 



§ Polyolbion, Song 25 (Holland's oration). 



|| Kingsley, Prose idylls — the fens. 



^[ British Zoology, Ed. 1768, p. 486. 



** In one of the only two existing decoys worked in Lincolnshire, that of Ashby 

 near the Trent, an average of 2,741 ducks, teal, and widgeon, with some others, 

 were captured between the years 1834 and 1S67 ; and since this 6,321 have been 

 taken in a single season, and of these 2.300 in thirty-one days, but in late years the 

 annual take appears to have somewhat fallen off. 



t+ It is satisfactory to know that for the last four or five years the black tern has 

 nested in Lincolnshire. 



Naturalist, 



