LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN WILD FOWL. 213 



companies they generally hold together in a solid phalanx, or in one long unbroken 

 line massed in several places. 



The scaup duck is a bold, strong swimmer, making the best of speed 

 even in rough weather; it is a hardy sea duck, unexcelled in its powers 

 of swimming and diving. It is not particularly shy and can usually 

 be approached with a little caution; but it must be hard hit to 

 be secured, as it is tough, has a thick coat of feathers, and is such 

 a powerful swimmer and diver that it is useless to pursue a wounded 

 bird unless it is shot over at once. It dives quickly and swims 

 rapidly away under water with its wings tightly closed, as many of 

 the best divers do. I have seen scaup ducks, which I had dropped 

 as if killed, sit up and shake themselves, dive before I could shoot 

 them over, and never show themselves again; if the sea is at all rough, 

 they can easily escape without showing enough to be seen. Mr. 

 Charles E. Alford (1920) has published some interesting notes on the 

 diving habits of this species, which seems to dive with extreme regu- 

 larity for definite periods; the dives varied in duration from 25 to 29 

 seconds and the periods between the dives varied from 11 to 19 

 seconds. 



Except during the mating season, as described above, scaup ducks 

 are usually silent. Their most characteristic note is a harsh, dis- 

 cordant "scaup, scaup," from which their name may have been de- 

 rived. They also occasionally utter soft guttural or purring sounds. 



Fall. — The fall migration is the reverse of the spring route, south- 

 eastward through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seacoast and south- 

 ward through the Mississippi Valley. Professor Cooke (1906) says 

 that these two routes are clearly revealed in the fall, "when this spe- 

 cies scarcely occurs in Indiana, though common both to the east and 

 west of that State." The first flights come fairly early in the fall, 

 with the first frosts, probably made up of the more tender birds which 

 have bred farther south and hatched out earlier. The later flights 

 consist of hardier birds from the far north, which come rushing down 

 ahead of the wintry storms and cold weather, probably driven out 

 by ice and snow. They frequent the lakes, larger ponds, and rivers, 

 feeding and resting on open water, even in rough weather; they often 

 gather in large flocks, which has given them the names, "raft duck" 

 and "flocking fowl"; a dense pack of these unsuspicious birds resting 

 on a sand bank in a river or floating on the surface of a pond often 

 offers a tempting shot to the unscrupulous gunner. 



Game. — The true sportsman, however, finds excellent sport in 

 shooting these swift-winged ducks over decoys. They decoy readily 

 to the painted wooden decoys used by the bay men of Long Island 

 and the Chesapeake and large numbers are killed from the floating 

 batteries, such as arc used for shooting canvasbacks and redheads. 



