150 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



I have a few other records by me, but they are not of 

 much importance. Booth, in his " Rough Notes " (vol. iii.), 

 says : " While staying for the punt-gunning at Tain, on the 

 shores of the Dornoch Firth, in the winters of 1868 and 

 1869, I remarked that the flocks of Tufted Ducks took their 

 departure about the end of March from Lochs Shin and Slyn 

 as well as the other large pieces of fresh water on which they 

 were usually to be found after the beginning of November"; 

 and Edward, in his paper on " The Birds of Strathbeg," 

 Aberdeenshire, printed in "The Naturalist" for 1854, mentions 

 it only as a winter visitor to that loch. Mr. Harvie-Brown, 

 I notice, says he has been unable to find any mention of the 

 species in the Scottish section of the Migration Reports. 

 There is, however, an entry in the Third Report (p. 1 2) 

 recording its abundance on Loch Leven on I2th September 

 1881. 



The conclusion I have arrived at is that the species has 

 been a regular winter visitor to many of our Scottish fresh- 

 water lochs for the greater part of this century probably 

 for a considerably longer period ; and it seems to me Mr. 

 Harvie-Brown regards Sir William Jardine's Loch Leven 

 record in a wrong light when he says it " must be classed 

 as an exceptional circumstance, if an early one." Here is 

 Jardine's statement: "We saw several pairs upon Loch 

 Leven in the month of April last (1843), where we under- 

 stood that they continued during a great part of winter." 

 Nor do I see how Jardine and other earlier observers can be 

 said to have spoken of it " as appearing on fresh water only 

 when the weather was severe " ; on the contrary, their re- 

 marks seem to me to point all the other way (cf. Montagu, 

 Selby, MacGillivray, etc.). Jardine's remark that the 

 weather was always severe when the bird appeared on the 

 river Annan was not inconsistent with the lacustrine char- 

 acter which he was aware it bore : the lakes freeze over 

 first, and the birds, naturally, then take to the rivers and 

 estuaries. 



The first proofs we as yet have of the breeding of this duck 

 in Scotland are no doubt the records of the two broods on 

 Butterstone Loch in the beginning of July I 875, and the nest 

 of ten eggs at Loch Leven on 2 9th May of the same year ; 



