much more wooded than it is now), and of birds and beasts. About thirty years before 1892, Tom Barnes (nephew of John Barnes, the old keeper, who would have been then over ninety if living), who afterwards went to New Zealand, saw a Kite feeding on a Crow in Bruern Wood, but failed to shoot it for Phipps. I wish now that he had succeeded, for Phipps would without doubt have preserved it to this day. This was the last that either of them heard of the Kite. But Phipps's father took a Kite's nest in Bledington Heath Wood, probably eighty years earlier, for it was when he was a boy or young man, and he would have been over a hundred years old if living then.
Mr. R.W. Calvertt was told, in 1897, by one Curtiss, of Charlbury, former gardener to the late Dowager Lady Churchill, at the Ranger's Lodge, Wychwood Forest, that Kites were quite common down to about the year 1850. Although he never took any interest in birds, yet he knew the Kite and its forked tail.
It was about fifty years since Tom Phipps saw a Raven. He was, as a little boy (of ten or twelve), "leasing" in a field on the Churchill side of Kingham, when a bird, looking like a great Crow, flew over, calling, in a deep hoarse low voice, "cork cork corrk," and the women in the field looked up and said: "Look at the Raven; there will be sure to be someone die at Kingham, for he is calling 'corpse corpse corpse.'"
Mr. George Wise told me, in 1891, that about fifty years earlier, he went with his father up to Tusmore Park in a donkey cart. While they were inspecting some sheep in a pen, a pair of "great old Ravens" came out of Tusmore Wood, and flew over the pen. They were the last he ever saw. They were, he said, bigger than Gor Crows. Mr. Wise is noted for a wonderfully good memory. He does not know the Kite, which, owing to the lack of woods, probably became extinct in this district long before it died out in the wooded parts of Oxon. But years ago I have heard ploughboys speak of the "Kite-Hawk," bestowing the name on the Sparrow-Hawk. And in the same way Mr. Wise speaks of the "Buzzard Hawk" and Sparrow Hawk, when he means the Sparrow-Hawk and Kestrel. The names, in fact, survive long after any recollection or tradition of the birds they really belong to. I once heard a man call a large female Sparrow Hawk a "Hare Harrier." The 'Hawk and
