LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN WILD FOWL 21 



Maj. Allan Brooks writes that "the note is a hoarse croak. They 

 have also a peculiar mewing cry, made only by the males in the 

 mating season." 



Mr. Millais (1913), who studied this species extensively in Ice- 

 land, writes of its behavior there as follows : 



On the water the male of this species looks a larger, clumsier, and blacker 

 bird than the common goldeneye. It seemed to me that it sits higher on the 

 water, and was a bird that commanded instant attention. In summer the 

 males, which, when the ducks have begun to sit, consort in small parties of 

 two to six, or more, are exceptionally tame, and will permit an approach to 

 within a few paces, if the observer moves slowly to the banks of the river 

 where they are feeding or resting. In rising to tly they are somewhat clumsy, 

 and run along the surface with considerable splashing, but they did not seem 

 to me to make nearly so much noise in flight as the common species. The 

 " singing " or " ringing " note is heard, but it is neither so loud nor so metallic. 

 On June 27 the males were still in their breeding dress. A few seem to keep 

 on the river near the nesting females, as if for form's sake, but the majority 

 were resorting to the great lake of Myvatn, where the parties seemed to in- 

 crease in size day by day. Females, with young, often floated past me while 

 I was trout fishing, and once I had to draw in my line to prevent hooking a 

 too confiding mother. Wliilst watching males on feed, it struck me that they 

 were less expert than the common goldeneye, and had more difficulty in get- 

 ting under water. There was more noise and splash to get under, but once 

 below the surface they seemed to be skilled performers of the highest order, 

 I saw them more than once, from the high bank where my tent was pitched, 

 feeding in exactly the same manner as the common species, turning over all 

 the small stones, and probing beneath all large ones, and into holes. They 

 stay less time under water in shallows than in the deep water of the lake, 

 the time occupied being a half to one minute. On the river they reappeared 

 again and again at the same spot, only pausing for a moment's rest and 

 splash down again, whereas on the lake they would often keep moving for- 

 ward in their dives, and take up a fresh position every time. They will stay 

 and fish in very rough streams, edging into the current and out again as soon 

 as they rise, but do not like such wild places as the harlequin. 



In Iceland their enemies seem to be Richardson's skua, Stercorarius para- 

 siticus L., which regularly attacks the females of all diving ducks and seizes 

 their young, and the Iceland falcon, Falco rusticolus islandicus, which kills 

 a few of the adults. There was hardly a morning or evening when I stayed at 

 Myvatn, in June-July, 1889, that we did not see one or other of these two 

 species harrying the ducks. Sitting in the tent to escape the awful plague of 

 flies, a sudden roar of startled ducks would be heard, and on my going to inves- 

 tigate there was the falcon, with perhaps two young birds in attendance, bear- 

 ing off some victims of its prowess. None of the ducks seemed to be unusually 

 scared when the falcons passed by, as they often did, by day and night. They 

 crouched on the water or rushed with their broods under the banks and hid 

 as well as possible. It was only after the stoop and kill, when tlie bird of 

 prey came on to their own level, that there was a general stampede of these 

 ducks in the immediate vicinity of the murder. 



Mr. Lucien M. Turner, in his unpublished notes, says : 



These goldeneyes are common along the entire coast of Labrador and occur in 

 scattered flocks of two or three to rarely more than a dozen in number. I have 



