WE have great plenty of larkes, and very good ones, especially in Golem-fields and those parts adjoyning to Coteswold. They take them by alluring them with a dareing-glasse,* which is whirled about in a sun-shining day, and the larkes are pleased at it, and strike at it, as at a sheepe’s eye, and at that time the nett is drawn over them. While he playes with his glasse he whistles with his larke-call of silver, a tympanum of about the diameter of a threepence. In the south part of Wiltshire they doe not use dareing-glasses but catch these pretty ætheriall birds with trammolls. * [“Let his grace go forward, and dare us with his cap like larks.” —Shakspere, Henry VIII. Act iii. sc. 2.] The buntings doe accompany the larkes. Linnets on the downes. Woodpeckers severall sorts: many in North Wilts. Sir Bennet Hoskins, Baronet, told me that his keeper at his parke at Morehampton in Hereford-shire, did, for experiment sake, drive an iron naile thwert the hole of the woodpecker’s nest, there being a tradition that the damme will bring some leafe to open it. He layed at the bottome of the tree a cleane sheet, and before many houres passed the naile came out, and he found a leafe lying by it on the sheete. Quaere the shape or figure of the leafe. They say the moone-wort will doe such things. This experiment may easily be tryed again. As Sir Walter Raleigh saies, there are stranger things to be seen in the world than are between London and Stanes. [This is the “story” which Ray, in the letter printed in page 8, justly describes as, “without doubt, a fable.”—J. B.] In Sir James Long’s parke at Draycot Cerne are some wheat-eares; and on come warrens and downes, but not in great plenty. Sussex doth most abound with these. It is a great delicacie, and they are little lumps of fatt. On Salisbury plaines, especially about Stonehenge, are bustards. They are also in the fields above Lavington: they doe not often come to Chalke. (Many about Newmarket, and sometimes cranes. J. EVELYN.) [In the “Penny Cyclopaedia” are many interesting particulars of the bustard, and in Hoare’s “Ancient Wiltshire, vol. i. p. 94, there is an account of two of these birds which were seen near Warminster in the summer of 1801; since when the bustard has not been seen in the county.—J. B.] On Salisbury plaines are gray crowes, as at Royston. [These are now met with on the Marlborough downs.—J. B.] “Like Royston crowes, where, as a man may say, Are friars of both the orders, black and gray.”—J. CLEVELAND’S POEMS. ’Tis certain that the rookes of the Inner Temple did not build their nests in the garden to breed in the spring before the plague, 1665; but in the spring following they did.