154 BULLETIN 130, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



next season, when no brant were to be seen, he succeeded in identify- 

 ing the eggs by a careful study of the feathers in the nest, the 

 parents keeping out of sight, as usual. He did finally succeed in 

 seeing a female ruddy leave her nest and swim away under water to 

 the nearest clump of rushes. According to Rev. J. H. Langille 

 (1884), the nesting habits of this duck are somewhat different in this 

 vicinity from what they are in North Dakota. He says: 



The nest, built some time in June, is placed in the sedges or marsh grass 

 over the water, and may contain as many as 10 eggs, remai'kably large for the 

 size of the bird, oval or slightly ovate, the finely granulated shell being almost 

 pure white, tinged with the slightest shade of grayish blue. The nest may be 

 quite well built of fine colored grasses, circularly laid, or simply a mere matting 

 together of the tops of the green marsh grass, with a slight addition of some 

 dry, flexible material. I found one nest on a hollow side of a floating log. It 

 consisted of a few dried grasses and ru.slies laid in a loose circle. Indeed, the 

 bird inclines to build a very slight nest. 



Robert B. Rockwell (1911) has found the ruddy duck nesting in 

 still more open situations in Colorado. On May 31, 1907, he found 

 a fine set of 10 eggs in an excavation in the side of a large muskrat 

 house, without any downy lining whatever, and only a few inches 

 above the water level. On June 8 this nest contained 11 eggs, 2 of 

 which were canvasback's or redhead's; there was also a new nest of 

 the canvasback, containing 8 fresh eggs, on the other side of the 

 same muskrat house and only 4 feet away; and, moreover, a new 

 ruddy duck's nest, containing 3 fresh eggs, was found on top of 

 the house and about midway between the two nests. " This was a 

 mere unlined depression in the litter composing the house, entirely 

 without concealment of any kind, and the great snowy white egg? 

 could be seen from a distance of many yards." Three ducks' nests 

 on one muskrat house is certainly a remarkable record. 



The ruddy duck has been known to use an abandoned nest of the 

 American coot, which sometimes is not much unlike its own. Doctor 

 Wetmore tells me that in the Bear River marshes in Utah the old 

 nests of the redheads are commonly appropriated by the ruddy 

 ducks. It also la3^s its eggs in other duck's nests and even in grebe's 

 nests. At Crane Lake, Saskatchewan, I flushed a female ruddy duck 

 from a clump of bulrushes in the midst of a large colony of western 

 grebes; a careful search through the clump revealed only grebes' 

 nests, but one of the nests held 2 eggs of the western grebe and 1 

 egg of the ruddy duck. I have found ruddy ducks' eggs in the nests 

 of the redhead and the canvasback, and others have mentioned the 

 same thing; the other two species often lay in the ruddy ducks' nests 

 also, so that it is sometimes difficult to decide which was the original 

 owner of the nest. 



