LIFE HISTORIES OF XORTH AMEBICAIS' WILD FOWL 69 



and among them were many of this si^ecies. The natives said, " Plenty birds 

 come from south, bime bye — mebbe one, two hours^ — plenty south wind." It 

 was true ; the birds seemed to be going just ahead of the storm from the south. 

 I learned to foretell a change in the wind by the migration of the birds, for 

 invariably a large migration occurred just before a south wind. We feared a 

 south wind, for if caught offshore, we could not sail back to Wales, and would 

 be forced to drift into the Arctic, so the migration of birds was watched with 

 interest. 



Nesting. — Nothing seems to be known about the courtship of the 

 Steller eider and very little has been published about its nesting 

 habits, which is not strange considering the remote and inaccessible 

 regions in which it makes its summer home. 



The following brief references to the nesting habits of this species 

 are given by John G. Millais (1913) : 



Middendorff found nests on flat tundra in the moss, and describes them as 

 deep, round, and lined with down. The male keeps in the vicinity of the 

 female, who sits closely and leaves the nest unwillingly, and when disturbed 

 flies off " with a harsh cry reminiscent of our teal, but still more harsh." 

 >Stener found a nest in Kamchatka amongst precipitous rocks near the coast. 



Personally I have had no experience with this species, and Mr. 

 Hersey never found its nest. I had five sets of eggs sent to me by 

 my correspondent, T. L. Richardson, who collected them near Point 

 Barrow, Alaska, during the summer of 1916. Unfortunately no 

 data came with them, but one of the sets was accompanied by the 

 nest, or rather the nest lining. This nest, which contains 10 eggs, 

 consists of a bulky mass of curly, coarse grasses and various mosses 

 and lichens, such as grow on the tundra, thoroughly mixed with 

 considerable very dark brown down and a few feathers from the 

 breast of the duck. Evidently the female plucks the down from 

 her breast, together with such feathers as casually come with it, 

 and mixes it with the coarser nesting material, as incubation ad- 

 vances. The nest is quite different from any other duck's nest that 

 I have seen, and is easily identified by the peculiar breast feathers 

 of the female Steller eider. The down varies in color from " benzo 

 brown " to " fuscous.'' 



Eggs. — The five sets referred to above consist of two sets of 6 

 eggs and one set each of 7, 8, and 10 eggs. They are typical eider's 

 eggs in appearance. The prevailing shape is elliptical ovate, some 

 are elongate ovate, and a few are nearly elliptical oval or approach- 

 ing oval. The shell is smooth, with little or no gloss. The color 

 varies from " light yellowish olive " to " water green " or from 

 " deep olive buff " to " olive buff." Many of the eggs are clouded or 

 mottled with darker shades of the above colore and many are quite 

 badly nest stained. 



