back heron coloured intermixed with long white fethers
the legges & feet not green but an ordinarie dark cork [?] colour.
[_Fol. 16._] The number of riuulets becks & streames whose banks are beset with willowes & Alders wch giue occasion of easier fishing & slooping to the water makes that [bir _crossed out_] handsome coulered bird abound wch is calld Alcedo Ispida or the King fisher. they bild in holes about grauell pitts [have their nests very full _crossed out_] wherein [are _crossed out_] is [_above_] to bee found great quantitie of small fish bones. & lay [a _crossed out_] very handsome round & as it were polished egges.
An Hobby bird[34] so calld becaus it comes in ether with or a litle before the Hobbies in the spring. of the bignesse of a Thrush coloured & paned[J] like an hawke marueliously subiet to the vertigo & and are sometimes taken in those fitts.
[34] This is evidently the Wryneck, which we now call the "Cuckoo's Mate," probably for the same reason that Browne associates it with the Hobby. It may be that the Hobby having become comparatively scarce, it was necessary to find another travelling companion for this bird, and that the Cuckoo was chosen as the most suitable. Old Norfolk names are Emmet-eater, and in one old book it is called Turkey-bird in a MS. note.
[J] That is marked with a barred or checkered pattern.
Upupa or Hoopebird[35] so named from its note a gallant marked bird wch I have often seen & tis not hard to shoote them.
[35] The Hoopoe would seem from this note to have been of more frequent occurrence than in the present day, see also in his answer to "Certain Queries" (Tract iv., Wilkin iv., p. 183), in which he says of this bird, "though it be not seen every day, yet we often meet with it in this country."
Ringlestones[36] a small [bird _crossed out_] white & black bird like a wagtayle & seemes to bee some kind of motacilla marina co[=m]on about yarmouth sands. they lay their egges in the sand & shingle about june and as the eryngo diggers tell mee not sett them flat butt upright likes [_sic_] egges in [a _crossed out_] salt.
[36] The Ring Plover is evidently the bird here referred to, but I have never known the name of Ringlestone applied to this species in Norfolk, nor have I met with it elsewhere. The Eryngo is now no longer an article of commerce, and its diggers are extinct, but not their tradition as to the position in which the eggs of this bird are said to be placed--a "vulgar error" which does not accord with the writer's experience. When the full complement of four eggs is laid, they are arranged with their pointed ends towards the centre of the nest, which is a slight hollow in the soil. The concavity of the nest therefore, as well as the disproportionate size of the larger end, gives the eggs somewhat the appearance of being placed in the position referred to, but the small end of the egg is always visible, Sir Thomas Browne does not seem to have been aware of the remarkable fact of this essentially marine bird habitually nesting on the sandy warrens about Thetford in the south-west of Norfolk, far from the sea, which it still does, though in reduced numbers, and is there known as the Stone-hatch, from its habit of paving its nest with small stones.