A sea fowl called a shearwater,[17] somewhat billed like a cormorant butt much lesser a strong & feirce fowle houering about shipps when they [clense _struck out_] cleanse their fish. 2 were kept 6 weekes cra[=m]ing them with fish wch they would not feed on of themselues. the seamen told mee they had kept them 3 weekes without meat. & I giuing ouer to feed them found they liued 16 dayes without [any hin _struck out_] taking any thing.
[17] Willughby's first acquaintance with the adult Manx Shearwater ("Ornithology," p. 334) was from a drawing sent him by Sir T. Browne, who describes the bird, as above, under the accepted name of Shearwater, and Willughby's excellent figure on plate lxvii. (which plate I believe is not to be found in some copies of the "Ornithology," and to which there is no reference in the text) has all the appearance of having been drawn from life. The drawing here referred to is mentioned by Ray in his "Collection of English words not generally known," as having been received, with others, from the "learned and deservedly famous Sir Thomas Browne, of Norwich." George Edwards ("Gleanings of Nat. Hist.," vii., p. 315), prior to 1764. says that he went to the British Museum and examined Browne's "old draught," but I could not find it among any of the papers I examined. In Browne's fourth letter to Merrett, by an error in the transcription, he is made by Wilkin to say that he kept twenty of these birds alive for five weeks; in the MS. it is clearly only two.
Barnacles[18] Brants Branta [wer _struck out_] are co[=m]on
[18] Barnacle and Brent Geese as we know them, the first by no means common here; the Wild Goose, probably _Anser cinereus_; the Scotch Goose (_see Note_ 9), probably the Gannet; and the Bergander, an old name for the Sheld-drake, as used by Turner in 1544, and derived from the Dutch Berg-eende, German Bergente ("Dict. Birds," p. 835). Browne's statement that this bird formerly bred about Northwold, or as it is even now occasionally called by the natives, "Norrold," some twenty miles from the sea; or, as he says, in the fourth letter to Merrett, "abounding in vast and spatious commons," is very interesting, although not a solitary instance, for I am informed that this bird breeds in the present day on the Gull Lake, Twig Moor, in Lincolnshire; but that it should have chosen such a nesting site is not more surprising than the fact of the Ring Plover, quite as strictly a marine species, frequenting the extensive sandy warrens about Thetford and Brandon, near the south-west border of the county, for the same purpose, as they still continue to do. But for Browne's mention of the circumstance we should not have been aware of this singular departure from the normal nesting habits of the Sheld-duck, as no tradition I believe exists on the subject, and at present it only nests in the sand-hills in some parts of the coast of N.W. Norfolk.