Wade: Status of the Stone Ciirleiv in Yorkshire. 15. 



of civilization iias wiped it out. Here my first study of its 

 habits commenced. 



Tliese, however, are memories of the past. Turning to 

 the present, there are but two locahties where the Stone Curlew 

 persists in Yorkshire as a breeding species, viz., one in the North. 

 Riding and the other on the Yorkshire Wolds. 



Of the former, Mr. Oxley Grabham wrote in the ' Naturalist ' 

 for September 1897, with a photograph of ' the eggs of one of 

 the last two or three remaining pairs of the bird which breed 

 in Yorkshire.' The locality is an open secret in the North 

 Riding, and to my certain knowledge, eggs have been ' lifted ' 

 there more than once in recent years, but happily the birds 

 have increased, as Mr. Riley Fortune reported at the Yorkshire 

 Naturalists' Union Protection Meeting on November 21st, 

 1908, that five pairs bred there this year, and another pair 

 in a locality close at hand. 



The second breeding place and last stronghold of the York- 

 shire Stone Curlew is the Yorkshire Wolds, an entirely different 

 ground from the flat, sandy warrens named previously. Rising 

 in a series of gentle undulations from the plain of Holderness, 

 on their Eastern border, the Wolds attain their greatest eleva- 

 tion on the west, north-west, and north edges, where they 

 drop suddenly into the Plain of York, the Vale of Pickering, 

 and the sea at Bempton Cliffs. Traces of their former wildness 

 remain, in the valleys carved out by ice, and showing sometimes 

 sides almost as cleanly cut as when the glaciers left them ; 

 in the patches of thin soil here and there, too barren even for 

 modern agriculture to tackle, occasionally in land given over 

 to scanty heather, coarse grass, and whin bushes, the covering 

 of the old sheep-walks. But for our present purpose, their 

 most salient feature is the broad sweeps of open country,, 

 fields of one hundred acres or m.ore, covered with a soil largely 

 composed of chalk and flints, out of sight of the villages, which, 

 as a rule, nestle in secluded hollows. Here the Stone Curlew 

 finds skulking ground enough, harmonising with his own 

 inconspicuous plum.age, and space where his quick eye detects 

 the approach of an enemy afar off, and gives him opportunity 

 to escape destruction. Here, in out-of-the-way corners, 

 scattered in odd pairs wherever it can escape persecution, the 

 bird leads a precarious existence. 



In the ' Birds of Yorkshire,' mention is made of forty birds 

 being seen in a flock at Ganton in October 1874. The greatest 



1909 January i. 



