Avis pugnax. Ruffes[31] a marsh bird of the greatest varietie of colours euery one therein somewhat varying from other. The female is called a Reeve without any ruffe about the neck, lesser then the other & hardly to bee got. They are almost all cocks & putt together fight & destroy each other. & prepare themselues to fight like cocks though they seeme to haue no other offensive part butt the bill. they loose theire Ruffes about the Autumne or beginning of winter as wee haue obserued [they _struck out_] keeping them in a garden from may till the next spring. they most abound in Marshland butt are also in good number in the marshes between norwich & yarmouth. [31] It is only necessary to add to Browne's interesting account of this remarkable bird that it lingered longer in Norfolk as a breeding species than in any other part of Britain, but that although it still visits us in spring it is doubtful whether it has bred for the last few years in the one favourite locality to which it clung so tenaciously. The "Marshland," here referred to as explained in a previous note, is a tract of country situated in north-west Norfolk, near King's Lynn. Of picus martius[32] or woodspeck many kinds. The green the Red the Leucomelanus or neatly marked [red _crossed out_] black & white & the cinereus or dunne calld [a re _struck out_] little [bird calld _written above_] a nuthack. remarkable in the larger are the hardnesse of the bill & skull & the long nerues wch tend vnto the tongue whereby it strecheth out the tongue aboue an inch out of the mouth & so [lik _crossed out_] licks up insecks. they make the holes in trees without any consideration of the winds or quarters of heauen butt as the rottenesse thereof best affordeth conuenience. [32] _Picus martius_ is here used, as it is by Sibbald, and all preceding writers, in a general sense for all birds commonly called "Woodpeckers," and does not imply that the Great Black Woodpecker (_Picus niger maximus_, of Ray's Synopsis), to which species the name was restricted by Linnæus, is found here, and Browne goes on to mention the three British Woodpeckers, the Green, the Red, by which the Great Spotted Woodpecker is intended, and the Leucomelanus, or Lesser-spotted Woodpecker. He also includes the Nuthatch, which was at that time (as well as the Wryneck) called a "Woodpecker." In this passage Browne, in making a correction, does not seem to have proceeded far enough, the word which Wilkin has rendered "dun-coloured," is certainly "dunne calld" in the MS.; but there are two alterations in the passage, and there is little doubt that he intended to write "dunne cull'd" (or coloured), which would make it read as Wilkin has printed it. The use of the word "nerve," for tendon or ligament, was in accordance with the phraseology of the time.