Also, reproduced many times in books and magazines are Frank Parkinson’s photographs of plover netting on Cowbit Wash with clap-nets. This involved nets being set on poles that were mounted on a hinged wooden “shoe” that would be placed in the ground. The nets would lay flat on the ground, usually set on a ‘battery’ a small area of land slightly higher than the surrounding pasture or fen with decoys set in the area of the net. Once birds landed the ropes attached to the net would be pulled and they would clap over the plovers. Whilst this method did catch some golden plover, more so in Ireland, the primary bird caught by this method was the lapwing. At the time these pictures were taken in the 1880’s the lapwing population in Britain was under stress largely due to egg collecting for sale. Lapwing eggs were so popular a delicacy that nature writers of the time stated that the town dweller was more likely to identify them in a shop window than the countryman was in the field. Eggs were collected by locals for their own consumption, but I have found no account of them being sold for market from Cowbit. My opinion is that eggs would have been sold from Cowbit Wash up to the 1928 Lapwing Act and it was most likely the practice of taking from first nests only prevailed based on what the late Bernard Tyrell told me many years ago. Lapwings can, under favourable conditions, lay up to five nests in a season, but as ground nesting birds, all are prone to failure due to weather or predation. It has to be noted that when the 1928 Act was debated in Parliament it was recognised that the commercial collecting of eggs combined with habitat loss and changes in farming had decimated the population of Lapwings in the south of Lincolnshire.
Cassells Natural History of 1866 accounts for more valuable birds being caught alive by nets around Spalding and being transported alive across the country:
“..the trade of catching ruffs is confined to few persons and scarcely repays the trouble and the expense of nets. These people live in obscure places on the verge of the fens, and are found out with difficulty; for few, if any, birds are bought by those who make a trade of fattening them for table. Mr Towns, the noted feeder at Spalding, assures us his family had been a hundred years in the trade; and they had supplied George the Second and many noble families in the kingdom. He undertook at the desire of the late Marquis of Townsend, when that nobleman was lord-lieutenant of Ireland, to take some ruffs to that country, and actually set of with twenty-seven dozen from Lincolnshire, left seven dozen at the Duke of Devonshire’s, at Chatsworth, continued his route across the kingdom to Holyhead, and delivered seventeen dozen alive in Dublin, having lost only three dozen in so long a journey, confined and generally crowded as they were in baskets which were carried upon two horses. During our stay at Spalding, we were shown into a room where there were about seven dozen males and a dozen females, and of the former there were no two alike. Our intrusion to choose some birds drove them from their stands, and compelling some to trespass upon the premises of others, produced many battles. It is a remarkable character of these birds that the feed most greedily the moment they are taken, a basin of bread and milk or boiled wheat, placed before them, is instantly contended for, and so pugnacious is their disposition that they would starve in the midst of plenty, if several dishes of food were not placed among them, at a distance from each other…….
…..few ruffs, comparatively speaking, are taken in the spring, as the old birds frequently pine and will not readily fatten. The principal time is September, when the young birds are on the wing; these are infinitely more delicate for the table, more readily submit to confinement, and are less inclined to fight.”
Cassell noted that effectively the birds were being caught twice a year in two seasons, September and early in the nesting season . He proposed that the fen hunters should either voluntarily or by bye-law stop collecting at the beginning of the nesting season for each female bird captured was possibly at the cost of at least four young resulting in great depletion of the species. Besides nets the author also gave account of horse-hair snares being set on the ground near their nesting areas to trap their feet.
I have also found accounts in old recipe books of ruffs caught in fenland being taken to midland areas such as Nottingham and Birmingham in large numbers to be fattened. They were highly expensive and were a delicacy of their age. They were typically cooked in a pan or roasted and served on toast with a rich sauce of orange, truffle sauces, or a rich sauce made of cream and eggs. Ruff puddings were made in a basin surrounded by suet crust, or a cold ruff pie filled out with hard boiled eggs was another alternative. There is little wonder the ruff is such a rarity in the fens and has never recovered its numbers from its clearly common occurrence in the Fens of the nineteenth century.
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