72 The Ottawa Naturalist. [June 



sentially an inland dweller. Macoun says that stragglers of this 

 species are occasionally taken on Lake Ontario and others on 

 Lake Erie, and Chamberlain that "one specimen has been taken 

 in Nova Scotia and two in New Brunswick." But, so far as the 

 writer is aware, this is the first record of its occurence in the 

 Ottawa valley. It was previously represented in the Survey 

 collection by one specimen from Lake Winnipeg, shot by Mr. J. 

 M. Macoun in 1884 and another from Crane Lake, Assa., shot by* 

 Mr. Sreadborough in 1896 ; by a series of its eggs, from a small 

 island at the western end of Lake Winnipegosis, collected by Mr. 

 J. B. Tyrrell in 1889 ; and by a large photograph of the nesting 

 place of a colony, at Shoal Lake, Manitoba. 



Two other species or varieties of pelican are of much rarer 

 occurrence in Canada, and both of these are of an essentially mar- 

 ine habit. 



One of these is the brown pelican, Pelecaniis fuscns, which 

 was first described by Linnaeus in 1766, and which is common in 

 the Southern Atlantic and Gulf States. During the last ten years 

 at least three specimens of it have been shot in Nova Scotia, and 

 one of these is in the Museum of the Survey. 



The other is the Calitornian brown pelican, Pelecamis Cali- 

 forntcHs, two specimens of which, according to Mr. Fannin, have 

 been shot on the coast of British Columbia. It was first described 

 by Ridgway in 1884, and may be only a local variety rti Pelecanus 

 fusciis. 



The "Pelican of the Wilderness," (Kaath) of the Psalms, is 

 the European white pelican, Pelecamis onocrofalus, the male of 

 which has no crest to the upper mandible in the breeding season. 

 This species spends the winter in Palestine and migrates to Russia 

 in the summer. Under the Mosaic dispensation, the use of its 

 flesh for food was forbidden to the Jews. A recent writer says of 

 it that the operation of feeding its young is rendered easier by 

 the parent pressing the pourh and lower mandible against the 

 breast, and the contrast of the red hook of the bill with the white 

 of the breast probably gave rise to the poetic idea of the ancients, 

 that the female pelican nourished her young with her blood. 

 From the earliest times the pelican has been the emblem of charity. 



