THE SHOVELER. 141 



The pike, which run to a large size in both meres, are 

 the chief enemies the fowl have to contend with, and 

 neither ducklings nor young coots whilst in their downy- 

 stage have much chance of escape from these fresh 

 water sharks. Several mallards and certainly one cock 

 shoveler, which left the mere as soon as a boat was 

 launched, flew olf in the direction of Stanford, and did 

 not return, but two hen shovelers, flushed from the 

 reeds, had evidently young concealed amongst the 

 herbage, and the keeper showed me afterwards two 

 nests from which the young had been hatched within a 

 few days. The first was in a wheat field about fifty 

 yards from the grassy borders of the mere — a slight 

 hollow in the ground with no other lining than a sprink- 

 ling of fine grass and down from the bird's breast, 

 mottled grey and white, and which I have found to 

 agree with that on the breast of a hen shoveler in my 

 collection. The bird had been flushed within a week 

 from her eggs, the fragments of which remained. The 

 second nest, some sixty or seventy yards from the 

 first, was hidden amongst the long grass on the 

 raised embankment of the mere, and, according to 

 the keeper, contained eleven eggs* when he last saw 

 it, a few days before. That these had been hatched 

 very recently was evident from a dead nestling, partly 

 out of the shell, being still fresh and not fly-blown ; 

 another youngster had died in the egg, and plenty of 

 broken shells filled the downy lining of the nest, which 



* Authors differ strangely as to the number of eggs laid by this 

 species. Lubbock says from seven to nine ; Selby ten to twelve ; 

 and St. John (" Nat. Hist, and Sport in Moray ") found a nest with 

 eleven eggs. Messrs. Sheppard and Whitear give the usual number 

 laid as eight or nine, but state that in one instance they knew of 

 thirteen in one nest, whilst Dresser, naming ten or twelve as the 

 ordinary amount, quotes Naumann as an authority for its sometimes 

 laying fourteen. 



