520 BIRDS OF SOMERSETSHIRE. 
and females at Mrs. Turle’s shop, which had been 
shot in the marsh and brought to her for preserva- 
tion. A very fine old male bird in my collection 
was shot in the marsh, not very far from Taunton, 
by an innkeeper of that town, in the middle of 
January, 1867. Yarrell says of these birds that they 
are rare visitors to the South of England, but that 
they have been killed in hard winters in Cornwall, 
Devonshire and Dorsetshire: for my own part I do 
not consider them such rare visitors to the south of 
Devon, for I have seldom made a winter birding ex- 
pedition to Exmouth without seeing at least one or 
two small flocks of these birds, even though the 
weather was not particularly severe; but on that 
open water they were excessively wild, and I never 
got a chance of having a shot at them. They 
seemed generally to keep in small flocks, some of 
them constantly diving for food, which appears to 
consist almost entirely of fish: amongst fresh-water 
fish trout and roach have been mentioned, in the 
pages of the ‘ Zoologist,’ as having been found in 
the throat of the Goosander. It appears to be a 
more truly migratory species than the Redbreasted 
Merganser, not remaining to breed in any part of 
England, or I believe in Scotland, south of the 
Orkneys and Shetlands. 
According to Yarrell, this bird is very fond of 
selecting the hollow trunk of an old rotten tree as a 
place for making its nest, and this propensity seems 
