LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN WILD FOWL. 135 



young are so active that it is almost impossible to catch them. In winter, not 

 unfrequently, great numbers visit the Lincolnshire coast, particularly in those 

 seasons when a grain ship is wrecked and broken up on some of the outlying sand 

 banks, at which time ducks congregate in large numbers from all parts to the feast. 

 I have, at this season, known flocks of two to three hundred sheld ducks to be seen 

 off the coast. 



With us the sheld duck is in all seasons of the year inseparably connected with 

 one of its most favorite haunts, the dreary flat coast of Lincolnshire, where the sea, 

 at the ebb of spring tides, recedes for miles, and is scarcely visible from the dune 

 except by a far-away glimmer along the horizon, or, if there is any breeze, by that 

 long checkered line of black and white, like the squares of a chessboard, rising and 

 falling alternately, in almost rhythmical pulsations, as the breakers on the sand 

 banks flash into light or recoil into deep shadows. 



DISTRIBUTION. 



Breeding range. — Temperate portions of Europe and Asia. East 

 to eastern Siberia. South to Mongolia, southern Siberia, Turkestan, 

 Caspian and Black Seas, France, and Spain. West to the British Isles. 

 North to 70° N. in Norway and 51° N. in the Ural Mountains. 



Winter range. — Southern Europe and Asia. East to Japan. South 

 to Formosa, China, Burma, northern India, Egypt, and northern 

 Africa to the Tropic of Cancer, West to the British Isles. North to 

 the Mediterranean basin and the Black and Caspian Seas. 



Casual records. — A straggler in the Faeroes and Iceland. One record 

 for North America (Ipswich Bay, Massachusetts, October 5, 1921). 



SPATULA CLYPEATA (Linnaeus). 



SHOVELLER. 



HABITS. 



The little shoveller is one of the best known and the most widely 

 distributed ducks in the world; by its peculiar spatulate bill and by 

 the striking color pattern of the drake it is easily recognized; it is 

 universally common over nearly all of the continents of North Amer- 

 ica, Europe, and Asia, wandering south in winter to northern South 

 America and Africa and even to Australia. It is essentially a fresh- 

 water duck at all seasons, never resorting to the seacoasts except when 

 forced to by stress of weather; it is a bog-loving species, fond of inland 

 sloughs, marshes, streams, and ponds, where it can dabble in the shal- 

 lov/s like a veritable mud lark. It is always associated in my mind 

 with the shallow pond holes and sluggish creeks which are so charac- 

 teristic of the wet, grassy meadows of the prairie region, where pairs 

 of these handsome birds are so frequently seen jumping into the air, 

 surprised by a passing train or wagon. 



Spring. — The shoveller is not a hardy bird and is therefore not an 

 early migrant in the spring; it comes along with the gad wall and the 

 baldpate after the ice has entirely left the sloughs. The migration 

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