RUDDY SHELD DRAKE. 133 



their young when able to quit their nesting holes, hence 

 probably the name of " sly goose" applied to this species 

 in some localities. The young are sometimes carried in 

 the bills of their parents down to the sea. St. John, 

 in his " Natural History and Sport in Moray" (p. 293), 

 refers to the strange instinct which enables the female, 

 sitting on her eggs many feet under ground, and more 

 or less distant from the sea, to know to a moment when 

 the tide begins to ebb, and then and then only to 

 betake herself to the freshly exposed feeding grounds. 

 The males of this species vary much in size as may 

 also the females, but the latter are always smaller 

 than the males as well as less brilliant in coloui-; 

 but, unlike the true ducks, both sexes in the genus 

 Tadorna are alike in plumage, and retain it when 

 once fully acquired. The flesh of the sheld drake is 

 coarse and unpalatable, and its food consists, according 

 to Selby, of " marine vegetables, molluscous shell-fish, 

 insects, &c.," but so minute are some of the forms of 

 moUusca which afford them a meal, and so great their 

 consumption, that Thompson, in his " Birds of Ireland " 

 (vol. iii., p. 69), describes the crop and stomach of one 

 of these birds as containing by a carefal computation 

 not less than twenty thousand minute mollusca, Mon- 

 tacuta purpurea, Shenea depressa, and Paludina muriatica. 

 Skenea being about the size of a clover seed ; Montacuta 

 one-twelfth of an inch broad when large. 



The Ruddy Sheld drake, Tadorna rutila (Pallas), 

 though more than once recorded as killed in Norfolk, 

 has not occurred to my knowledge in an undoubtedly 

 wild state. "^ In one or two instances birds supposed to 



* Yarrell states that a specimen was shot at Iken, near Orford, 

 Suffolk, in January, 1834, " which passed into the possession of 

 Mr. Manning, of Woodbridge," but this, as Mr. J. H. Gurney, jun., 

 has pointed out to me, is evidently the bird thus recorded by the 



