GOLDEN-EYE. 221 



It was in sucli " pathless wilds of water, sedge, and 

 reed " that the bittern made its nest, its presence being 

 only made known by its summer cry, or the fact of its 

 having nested by the fledglings brought by the retriever 

 in the early days of flapper shooting. 



Four examples of the hybrid, as it is now generally 

 regarded, between the golden-eye and the smew, have 

 been recorded, and though none of them was observed 

 in this country, yet it is obvious that such a bird might 

 almost any year occur in the British Islands ; and, as 

 very little notice of this cross has been taken by writers 

 on British ornithology, particulars of the several cap- 

 tures may be of interest here. Professor Newton has, 

 therefore, at my request, kindly furnished me with the 

 following note on the subject : — 



" The first example, a male, in apparently fall 

 plumage, killed on the river Oker, near Brunswick, 

 in the year 1825, was described and figured under 

 the name of Mergus anatarius, as belonging to anew 

 species by Eimbeck (^ Isis,' 1831, pp. 299-301, pi. iii.). 

 The specimen, which is in the Museum at Brunswick, 

 was subsequently refigured by Naumann in his ' Vogel 

 Deutschlands ' (vol. xii., frontispiece), and again by 

 Dr. Eudolf Blasius, in the ' Monatsschrift des deutschen 

 Vereins zum Schutze der Vogelwelt' for 1887. The 

 second, a young male, was shot in February, 1843, 

 in the Isefjord, on the north coast of Zealand 

 (Denmark), as described by Kjeerbolling, under the 

 name of Anas (Clangula) mergoides (' Naumannia,' 

 1853, pp. 321-331, ' Journ. fiir Ornithologie,' 1853, 

 Extrah. pp. 29-32), and figured by him in his ' Skan- 

 dinaviens Fugle ' (Suppl, pi. 29), he having already 

 given in the same work (pi. 55) a copy of Naumann's 

 plate. This specimen is now in the Koyal Museum at 

 Copenhagen. The third example, also a male, to all 

 appearance in full plumage, was shot out of a flock of 

 ducks, near the island Pol, on the north coast of Ger- 

 many, at the end of February, 1865, though not re- 

 corded until ten years later by its then owner, Franz 

 Schmidt, of Wismar, in the 'Archiv der Naturges- 

 chichte in Mecklenburg ' (1875, pp. 145, 146). It is now 

 in the possession of Herr Oscar Wolschke, of Annaberg, 



