and of the great rapidity with which they ran and dived. Although their foster-parent was very assiduous in her attention to them, they proved, after the first three days, quite indifferent to her; came to the yard with the poultry, and ate potatoes freely. When visiting the islands of Strangford Lough, on the 20th and 21st of June, 1832, I saw two pair of these birds, each pair flying in company. The species was said, by intelligent farmers who accompanied us, to breed here, on Island Mahee, Island Reagh, and Scatrick. One of our party had often found their nests, which he described as situated in "scroggy" places, or where there is some short, thick brushwood: when he has approached the nest, in the absence of the parent, the young birds have left it, and run towards him. The name for these birds, here, is scale-duck, which my friend, as has been stated, believed to apply to the shell-duck, when he sought to obtain the eggs from this locality. The birds noticed under Goosander (the next species to be treated of), by the latter of the two names, and said to breed about the river Shannon, are probably M. serrator. Sir William Jardine remarks, in one of the excellent notes to his edition of Wilson's 'American Ornithology,' that:-"In Hudson's Bay (according to Hearne) they are called shelldrakes; the name by which they are also distinguished by the common people in all the rivers of the south of Scotland" (vol. iii. p. 90). Audubon, too, informs us that "the red-breasted merganser is best known through the United States by the name of shelldrake" (vol. v. p. 93).

I have met with the red-breasted merganser in Strangford Lough different times in summer since the date last mentioned; but it will be sufficient to give the following observations, made by Mr. J. R. Garrett in 1849. He remarks:- "On the 3rd of June I saw three pair at Island Gabbogh. The boatman (who is a shooter in winter and a fisherman in summer) showed me a spot on the island where he had, two or three years ago, caught a 'scale-duck' on her nest, containing twelve eggs. On the smaller Bird Island I saw another pair of mergansers, but could not find their nest. At Chapel Island I discovered a nest of

this species, containing two eggs, on the 6th of June. It was situated under a closely-matted briar [Rubus] or rather mass of briars, on the sloping side of a hill, about thirty yards from highwater mark, and was very carelessly constructed, the materials being merely fragments of the decayed briar and withered herbage, with a few downy feathers. The eggs were almost wholly concealed by these substances. The pair of mergansers were flying about the island when we landed. We saw another pair on the Lythe Rock, but searched in vain for their nest."

A friend, boating on Lough Neagh, near Toome, about twenty years ago, saw one of these birds fly closely past him several times, and, on his landing upon a small island, he discovered its nest, containing many eggs. When I was at Shanes Castle, on the banks of this lake, on the 28th of July, 1833, a female merganser "pushed out" from the shore with her six young, which were about the size of three-weeks-old ducklings. The parent kept considerably ahead of her progeny, no doubt to induce them to follow with celerity, which they did for only a short way from the beach, and then collected into a close little group, displaying by their gestures the greatest affection towards each other all this time the old bird continued to retreat. On the 29th of May, 1836, I again saw at Lough Neagh, but at the opposite side, three old birds. In these breeding localities I believe that the species remains permanently, and that the individuals seen upon the coasts, except in weather so severe as to drive them from inland waters to the sea, are migratory birds. They seem to frequent Belfast Bay chiefly when migrating southward in early winter and northward in early spring--thus to be of "double passage;"-they are considered to be more common at these periods than in mid-winter.

:

My notes on them here are:- -March 1831, two killed. April 9, 1838; two beautiful specimens shot in the bay, both in the plumage of Bewick's red-breasted merganser, with two black stripes across the white on the wing; a third was in company with them.* September 20, 1837;

* Major T. Walker remarked in a letter to me respecting Bewick's figure, that it does not represent the crest as this usually appears. In birds which he had living,

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three obtained. Nov. 7, 1838; four killed at a shot; one having caught a fish, the others flocked to their apparently more fortunate neighbour, and thus all fell victims on examining the stomachs of two of these, one was found to contain only fragments of stone, of which there were many; and the other, a small fish, and a number of the " earbones" of some of the cod-tribe (Gadidae). September 27, 1840; two seen in the bay. It is late in autumn and in spring chiefly that they are brought to Belfast from other northern localities in the first week of October, I have seen specimens from Green-castle, on the Londonderry coast, and on the 9th of March, 1836, I purchased two from Killinchy, Strangford Lough: their stomachs were filled with the remains of fish. I have noted them twice as obtained in mid-winter ;one at Strangford Lough on January 6th, 1838, and on the 26th of the same month, an immature male, having one bar of black on the white speculum, was shot on a dam of fresh-water, near Carrickfergus : its stomach contained many pebbles and the remains of fishes, and in its œsophagus were five large three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus brachycentrus). The late Mr. John Montgomery noted this species as received from Dundrum Bay, county Down, in November and December, and as being there every winter, where the different sexes are respectively called bar-drakes and bar-ducks.

A fowler endeavouring to obtain some of these birds in Larne Lough during three successive days in the middle of March 1850, was unable to do so, even with a swivel-gun, in consequence of their wildness. At least fifty birds were seen very far up the narrow part of the lough each day, some in pairs, and not more than a dozen in any flock. They came up daily from about its entrance, feeding with the flowing tide, and continued, on its ebb, to feed downwards. Within the preceding two months, fully a hundred mergansers daily frequented this locality for a considerable time, and flocks of twenty birds were common. Some years ago, nine were killed here at one shot with a swivel-gun.

Localities in Antrim and Down only have hitherto been noticed in connection with this bird. In the north-west of Donegal it is said to be of "autumn passage, common;"* is frequent during winter in Carlingford Bay, county Louth, and likewise in Dublin Bay,

'the crest was always upright, unless when it sloped a little backward, in fright ; it never lay down entirely.'

*Mr. J. V. Stewart.

where "it is the first of the Anatide to appear in autumn, and the last to depart in spring;-being sometimes seen before the end of August, and so late as the middle of May."* Mr. R. Ball, writing from Dublin on January the 16th, 1837, mentioned his having procured three mergansers that day, the stomach of one of which was enormous. The bird was gorged to the mouth with sand-eels (Ammodytes lancea), twenty-four of which were found in it. This species is considered rare at Wexford, where it is called land harlan: a bird which came under examination here was filled to the oesophagus with crustacea. In Waterford harbour, and at Dungarvan,§ on the coast of the same county, this merganser has been obtained, but is considered rare, as it was also in Cork harbour until the last few winters: during them, however, Mr. R. Warren, jun., has observed flocks there regularly. On the 23rd of January, 1849, he shot a very fine old male as the bird was fishing among some rocks at the opposite side of this harbour from Cove; on being skinned, a young hake and a pipe-fish were found in its œsophagus. Mergansers were more numerous than usual in the winter of 1849-50. On the 11th of January, in particular, between one and two hundred were seen on the water and on wing at the back of Cove Island. They were very wild, and would not admit of a boat approaching them within gun-shot. To Bantry Bay, and the bays and harbours on the coast of Kerry, they are regular winter visitants : ||-several have been killed in the firstnamed locality by my informant. Inland, they are common on the lakes of Galway in winter, and about Lough Conn, in the adjoining county of Mayo, they were often seen on sale by Mr. Bent Ball in autumn, having been killed as "flappers" (before well able to fly), in the neighbourhood of their birth-places.

*Mr. R. J. Montgomery.

Audubon remarks:-" Gluttonous in the extreme, it frequently gorges itself so as to be unable to rise. I have several times seen one of them obliged to eject a great part of the contents of its stomach and gullet before it could fly off, and some which I have kept a day or two in confinement have died in consequence of swallowing too many fishes (vol. v. p. 93).

Mr. Poole.

§ "Whence an adult male was sent me, February 11, 1838."--R. Davis, jun.

Mr. R. Chute.

Mr. G. Jackson.

Mr. Yarrell does not mention any breeding-haunt of this species in England either at the present or any former period. Scotland and its islands, however, have always been known as resorted to for the purpose of nidification, and we find both the freshwater and marine loughs of Ireland to be so. Pennant mentions this bird as breeding in the island of Islay, which it does at the present time. When there, in January 1849, several, among which were adult males, came under my notice-I learned that a pair bred in the preceding summer near the sea-beach of the island, at Ardimersy, but that they do not nidify about the little inland fresh-water lakes, or tarns, in at least the south-east portion of the island. They are called grey divers. Numbers breed annually on the marine islets off Islay, laying from ten to twelve eggs.

The late Mr. G. Matthews informed me, on his return from the coast of Norway, that a species of Mergus (M. serrator most probably, from description) was seen in numbers at Bergsfiord in September and October. Several were shot there, and, though tame and easily approached, they generally, unless killed dead, escaped by diving, having, as was remarked, "the power apparently to remain under water for ever. The manner in which they out-manœuvred us gave us some hearty laughs." Captain May was told during his sporting tour in 1849, before alluded to, that the Quäns, who live along the banks of the Alten in Norway, make boxes and place them in the birch-trees at the river-side for the mergansers to lay in, and when a good number of eggs have been deposited, they rob the nests." The Mergus merganser, or goosander, may, however, here be meant, as it is well known to build in trees in Scandinavia. A statement just similar to that given, but in reference to the golden-eye duck, has been contributed by Mr. Dann to Mr. Yarrell's work.

North America, as well as Europe, claims this very handsome species.