LIFE HISTORIES OF NORTH AMERICAN WILD FOWL 81 



females flyiug from the water and settling on the laud gave promise of a 

 great nesting place. We hauled the boat on a shelving ledge and quickly 

 scrambled to the top of the bank. Here an immense ice cake and drifted snow 

 had collected on the edge of the bank and extended for several hundred feet 

 in length and over 30 yards wide. The height of the seaward edge was then, 

 June 29, over 4 feet. The dripping water and slippery rock made it difficult 

 to surmount in our anxiety to get at the eiders, which had taken alarm and 

 were scurring in hundreds by wing and walk from the land to the sea. In a 

 moment a nest was found and then another and so on until hundreds were 

 discovered. Some with 1 or 2 eggs, others with 6 or 7, these being the more 

 numerous ; others with as many as 12. Every grass patch in the depressions 

 of the rocks was examined and the eggs put into piles to be taken to the boat. 

 Several small ponds surrounded by high grasses which were given a luxuriant 

 growth by the droppings of these birds where they had come to bathe or drink 

 tor many successive seasons. Among these patches were also the nests of a 

 few Phalaropes, Phalaropus lobatus, which twittered and flitted before us. 

 A single nest of a gull was also found. The nests of the eiders were so dif- 

 ferently constructed even on this one island that it would be impossible to 

 describe them all. The materials of which they were composed were grasses, 

 weeds, stalks, and down. The amount of the vegetable matter depended on 

 the particular situation of the nest, for if in the midst of plenty of such 

 material, the nest was often several inches high, resting on a mound formed 

 from the decayed mass of material used as a nest many years ago. At times 

 merely a slight depression was cleared of vegetation and on the bare earth 

 the egg was deposited and covered with down. 



On my trip down the coast of Labrador in 1912 I found eiders 

 common all along the coast from the Straits of Belle Isle northward, 

 but generally they were so shy that it was impossible to shoot any. 

 The largest breeding colony I saw was on one of the outer islands 

 off the coast near Hopedale, which we visited on July 22, It was a 

 small, low, rocky island with a very little grass and a few mosses 

 growing in the hollows and crevices between the rocks. No male 

 eiders were seen on or about the island, but the females began flying 

 off as we landed and we flushed many from their nests as we walked 

 over the flat rocks. We found between 20 and 30 nests with eggs, 

 varying in number from 1 to 5. Some natives had visited the island 

 a fortnight or more previously and had collected about 150 eggs; 

 there must have been between 30 and 40 nests on the island at that 

 time. The nests were on the ground, in the grass or moss, or in hol- 

 lows between the rocks; some of them were well made, with a gener- 

 ous supply of pure down, but in most of them the down was mixed 

 with grass and rubbish, and in some of the nests the supply of down 

 was very scanty. Apparently these nests were second or third at- 

 tempts at raising broods, and evidently the supply of down was 

 becoming exhausted. A drizzling rain was falling all the time that 

 we were on the island, so my attempts at photographing the nests 

 were not as successful as tliey might have been. We shot five of the 

 ducks as they flew from the nests, all of which proved to be the 



