4 BULLETIN 126, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 



Near the north end of Lake Winnipegosis, on Whiskey Jack Island, 

 we visited, on June 18, 1913, a deserted ice house where we were 

 told that we might find the "little saw bills," hooded mergansers, 

 nesting. It was an old tumbled-down affair, with the roof nearly 

 gone and partly filled with loosely piled bales of hay; there did not 

 seem to be any suitable nesting sites for "saw bills" anywhere in the 

 vicinity, so we sat down to eat our luncheon. While so occupied 

 we were surprised to see a female American merganser fly up and 

 alight on the landing and gaze longingly into the ice house. We then 

 began an exhaustive search by moving the bales of hay and crawling 

 into the crevices between them. Wliile peering into a dark cavity 

 I thought I saw something moving regularly like a breathing duck; 

 we pulled away some more bales and there sat a female merganser 

 on her nest within 2 feet of my face; I reached in to catch her but 

 she slipped away and escaped through another passage way. There 

 were 15 eggs under her in a nest profusely lined with white down, mixed 

 with hay. Further search revealed another nest near by, similarly 

 located; the bird had left the nest and had carefully covered the 12 

 eggs which it contained with a soft blanket down. Lieut. I. T. Van 

 Kammen (1915) found two nests in an old, abandoned lighthouse 

 tower; the nests were about 3 feet apart and "each nest was placed 

 in a depression, perhaps 5 inches deep, scraped out of the soft dirt 

 of the lighthouse floor." 



Audubon (1840) gives an attractive account of finding the nest of 

 a goosander on a marshy island. He describes the nesting site and 

 nest as follows: 



The islands on which the goosander is wont to breed are mostly small, as if selected 

 for the purpose of allowing the sitting bird to get soon to the water in case of danger. 

 The nest is very large, at times raised 7 or 8 inches on the top of a bed of all the 

 dead weeds which the bird can gather in the neighborhood. Properly speaking, 

 the real nest, however, is not larger than that of the dusky duck, and is rather neatly 

 formed externally of fibrous roots and lined round the edges with the down of the bird. 

 The interior is about 7^ inches in diameter and 4 inches in depth. 



Mr. W. L. DaAVson (1909) says of its nesting habits in Washington: 



Now and tlien a crevice in the face of a cliff does duty, and old nests of hawk or 

 crow have been pressed into service. Moderate elevations are favored, but Mr. 

 Bowles once found a nest near Puget Sound in a decayed fir stub at a height of over 

 a hundred feet. The cavity, wherever found, is warmly lined with weeds, grasses, 

 and rootlets, and plentifully supplied with down from the bird's breast. 



Mr. Fred II. Andrus (1896) thus tlescribes a nest which he found 

 in Oregon : 



May 26, 1895, I collected a sot of 10 American merganser's eggs from a hole in tlie 

 rocks about 100 feet above the Umpqua River. The nest was about 15 feet from the 

 top of a nearly perpendicular cliff about 50 feet in height, and was found by watching 

 the bird. In going to the nest the bird would fly up and down the river in an oval 

 course several times, and finally, coming close to the water as if to light, would 



