Following on from the review of early records of Collared Pratincoles in Britain (McInerny et al. 2024), the following brief extract from John Clare’s natural history writings, from sometime in the early nineteenth century, might be of interest. Clare wrote: ‘[I] saw four odd-looking birds, like large swallows [Hirundo rustica] of a slate colour on their wings and back and their bellies white... they had forked tails and long wings and flew exactly in the manner of a swallow but instead of skimming along the ground they rose to a great height...’, adding that he ‘frit them up’ from a pond ‘often haunted by water birds’.