208 ARDEID/E.
and I have heard my mother say that, before she married,
about the beginning of this century, she used to hear them
booming in the warrens and swamps of Manton and Twig-
moor in her afternoon rides from Scawby.’ ” As regards the
other eastern counties, many particulars of great interest will
be found in Mr. Stevenson’s ‘Birds of Norfolk.’ The Bittern
has, naturally, been found more abundantly in the districts
best suited to its habits, but there is not a county in
England in which it has not been obtained at one time or
another.
Before the drainage of the fens the Bittern was an annual
breeder with us, and even during the present century several
instances are on record. Graves, in his ‘ British Ornitho-
logy,' mentions a nest on the Cam, in 1821, which contained
four young birds and an addled egg. The Rev. W. B.
Stonehouse, writing in -1839, says, in ‘ The History and
Topography of the Isle of Axholme,’ in Lincolnshire, “ In
1817 I shot two Bitterns on Burringliam Moor, opposite
Daddythorpe, and on one occasion saw a nest containing
four eggs.” Eyton, in his ‘Fauna of Shropshire,’ says a
hatch of these birds came off at Cosford Pool, near Nufnal,
in 1836; and during the same summer, and in the same
county, a pair of Bitterns bred at Tonglake, Albrighton, in
a reedy pond of half an acre, surrounded by bushes, about
half a mile from the Holyhead road ; two young birds, about
half grown, were caught by a farmer’s boy. In 1849 or
1850, a nest containing four eggs was found at the Reservoirs,
near Tring, in Hertfordshire; and Capt. A. W. M.
Clark-Kennedy states on the authority of the Rev. Harper
Crewe that a nest and eggs were taken by Mr. Williams, of
Tring Park, and the female shot, near Drayton Beauchamp,
in Buckinghamshire (Zool. s.s. p. 1255).* Messrs. Sheppard
and Whitear, in their ‘ Catalogue of Norfolk and Suffolk
Birds, state that they had once obtained an egg of this bird
in the marshes of Norfolk; Lubbock, in his ‘ Fauna of
Norfolk,’ mentions several instances of the young of the
It is not improbable that these records relate to the same occurrence, as
Drayton Beauchamp is close to Tring.
COMMON BITTERN. 209
Bittern taken in that county; and Mr. W. R. Fisher gave
the Author a drawing of one taken, with an addled egg, at
Ranworth, by Mr. D. B. Preston, and figured in ‘ The
Zoologist’ (p. 1321). An egg in the collection of Prof.
Newton was taken at Horsey in 1841; an unfledged bird
was picked up alive in the marshes near Yarmouth about
1845, and lived in captivity till the winter of 1847; and
Mr. Gurney has three nestlings, taken at Surlingham or
Ranworth in 1847 or 1848. The latest recorded instance
is of a nest found on a small broad at Upton, on the 30th
of March, 1868, containing two eggs, now in the possession
of Mr. H. M. Upclier, of Feltwell; and on the 25th of
May of that year a young bird was caught alive in the
same locality. Considering that out of 108 specimens stated
by Mr. Stevenson to have been brought into Norwich in the
course of eighteen years, fifteen were obtained in February,
ten in March, and one in April, there can be no doubt that if
unmolested the ‘ boom ’ of the Bittern might again be heard
in our land during the breeding-season.
In Scotland, according to Mr. R. Gray, the Bittern is not
a common species anywhere, but he has seen examples from
almost every county ; and it occasionally straggles to the
Outer Hebrides, the Orkneys, and the Shetlands. In Ireland
it used to breed until the first quarter of this century in the
marshes at the confluence of the Blackwater and Bride, in
co. Waterford; but now it is principally an irregular winter
visitant.
According to Reinhardt, the Bittern has once occurred
as a straggler in Greenland. It is a summer visitor to
Sweden up to about 60° N. lat., and its range can be traced
through Northern Russia to latitudes varying from 57° to
64°: the latter on the Yenesei. Southwards its summer
distribution extends throughout the entire Palsearctic region
from the Azores to China and Japan. In the warmer parts
of Europe it is resident; its numbers being augmented in
winter by migrants from the north. It breeds in Persia and
m Northern and Central India, and has occurred in Burmah ;
hut Colonel Legge does not mention it among the birds
VOL. IV. E ft