Note 8 — NOTES[H] ON CERTAIN BIRDS FOUND IN NORFOLK.

The "Elke" is an obsolete name for the Wild Swan (Cygnus musicus), which occurs in the present day in the same numbers and under precisely similar circumstances as Browne describes; but of course this was the only species of wild swan known to him. The remarkable recurvation of the trachea within the keel of the sternum, which also prevails to a greater or less degree in four out of the five or six species of Cygnus found in the Northern Hemisphere, did not escape Browne's notice, although he was not the first to describe it, and he rightly observes that this peculiarity is absent in the Mute Swan (C. olor), but exists in a different and even more exaggerated form in the Crane. He, however, was mistaken as to the extreme northerly range which he assigns to this species. So marked a feature as the absence of the "berry" on the beak of this species did not escape Browne's observation, and he refers to it in the eighth letter to Merrett, who in his second letter to Browne remarks "the difference in the elk's bill by you signified is remarkable to distinguish it from others of its kind," indicating that this distinction was previously unknown to him.