170 The Animal-Lore of Shakspeare's Time. 
and hare were protected on account of the amusement 
their pursuit afforded, and the badger, otter, and wild cat 
still remained in parts of the island. 
To the extensive drainage of marshy lands is to be 
traced the diminution and final disappearance of a great 
number of water and wading birds. Naturalists are 
indebted to the slowness with which this work of 
reclaiming the land proceeded for the preservation of 
many species to a sufficiently recent period to be re¬ 
corded by the sportsman or the chronicler. “The old 
order changeth, yielding place to new,” and though sports¬ 
men and epicures may lament the scarcity of the heron, 
the curlew, and the knot, the lover of melody has full 
compensation in the song of the lark, the robin, and the 
thrush. The traveller in the Lincolnshire fens, the last 
resort of many species of water birds, would hardly now 
send his friends at home a report such as old Camden 
gives :— 
“ All this tract-over at certaine seasons, good God, what store of 
foules, to say nothing of fishes, is heere to be found! I meane not 
those vulgar birds which in other places are highly esteemed and beare 
a great price, as teales, quailes, woodcocks, pheasants, partridges, &c.,but 
such, as we have no Latin names for,'the very delicate dainties of service, 
meates for the demigods, and greatly sought for by these that love the 
tooth so well, I meane, puits, godwitts, knotts, that is to say, Canuts or 
knoutsbirds, for out of Denmark they are thought to fly hither.” 
( Britaine .) 
The Lev. R. Lubbock, in his work, The Fauna of 
Norfolk , published 1845, gives many interesting particu¬ 
lars of the feathered inhabitants of the marshy districts 
of that county. He writes (page 48):— 
“ The Norfolk fens must in days of yore have literally swarmed with 
different species of birds. If we glance at the position of Norfolk and 
Suffolk upon the map, we at once perceive that they stand out as it 
were offering an asylum to the storm-beaten bird coming from the 
ocean. If we consider the great variety of soil to be found in the 
marshy part of the county, and the way in which swamp and high 
