g2 AN OFF DAY— 
get on with their nesting. We had already 
found six mallards’ nests this season. Reckon- 
ing an average of at least twelve eggs to each 
meant that over seventy ducklings should 
soon be paddling about these waters. Seventy 
young to twelve old birds seems a good rate 
of increase ; but how many of these young- 
sters would survive ? (We only subsequently 
saw one complete brood swimming about.) 
Their chief enemies are pike, rats, hawks and 
our old friends the carrion crows, and many 
perish in other unnatural ways, too. 
Besides the mallard’s nests we only found 
a thrush’s with three eggs, and a moorhen’s 
without eggs on Moorhen Island, though we 
searched closely. One of the duck’s nests 
formed a very pretty picture. It was on the 
ground, as usual: in the centre were twelve 
of the greenish eggs with some down round 
them, lying in a broad ring of light brown 
leaves of which the nest was made, the 
whole being framed with, and hidden by, 
the delicate fern-like foliage of young fool’s 
parsley, of which there were quantities here. 
