'Bustard and Grouse
Most of the fauna have their ups and downs, with foxes
• perhaps as an exception. Their numbers seem to depend 'almost wholly on the' degree of violent .destruction by the -hand of man.' -Several species of course have clean vanished more or less of late years. 'One of these is the bustard. It was frequent enough at one time to give its name (of which Custard is said to have been one local form) to various stretches of land. Its disappearance was doubtless due to the same sort of cause that exterminated the Dodo in Mada- gascar ; it was a large and an easy victini. There is a long- distance train penetrating to the back blocks of Queensland which is called by local satirists " the Turkey express." It is the most friendly and deliberate train that I ever travelled on, though it proceeds across a plain singularly free from gradients or indeed population or any of the usual causes for arrested or delayed progress. You may observe the country with nice leisure—the occasional scrub, the narrow, towering ant heaps, the brown grass and even the kangaroo and bower bird. One of the most noticeable of the fauna is the wild turkey or bustard, which gives its name to the express for the reason—so it is alleged—that when the engine drivers see its head above the grasses they get off the engine to shoot it. Black game, as correspondents to The Spectator have proved, were once fairly common in Surrey. The present Lord Onslow's father (so he once told me) shot grouse on his Surrey estate. Perhaps we shall see them again, in spite of the over-population of the county. It is at any rate a good omen that the grouse is being re-established— if slowly—as far south as Devon.
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