GREAT BUSTARD. 
115 
indeed, the whole of the Slruthionidce, from their 
form and habits, and large size, are marked objects, 
and are a tribe of birds which have fled before the 
inroads of population and agriculture. Abroad, 
in many of the districts where the Emu and Ostrich 
abounded in almost innumerable herds, they have 
become extremely rare, and are either entirely extir- 
pated or driven to seek more retired plains, and like 
causes have, in a similar manner, reduced the num- 
bers of our native Bustard to straggling instances of 
their occurrence. In some few stations they seem 
still to be preserved, and keep up a scanty stock, 
from which, perhaps, may stray the occasional speci- 
mens of whose capture we arc generally made aware 
through the public prints. 
Newmarket Heath and Salisbury Plain, Sussex 
or South Downs, Royston Heath, &c., are well 
known stations of old for these birds ; and Devon- 
shire, Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suf- 
folk, Lincolnshire, &c., are all mentioned as districts 
where occasional specimens have been seen or pro- 
cured. So late as 1819, Mr. Yarrell states, upon 
“■authority," that nineteen were observed together at 
Westcape in Norfolk, where they are carefully pre- 
served by the proprietor. In Scotland, we have very 
few records of them. Sibbald seems to think they 
appeared occasionally “unam non ita pridem in 
Lothiana Orientali visam fuisse.”* “ One was shot 
in 1803, in Morayshire, by William Young, Esq. of 
Boroughhead.”t Mr. Mudie, in his British Birds, 
* Prodronuis ii. part 2. p. 17. t Yarrell ii. p. 367. 
