216 ALASKA INDUSTRIES. 



17. Branta canadensis. White-collared Goose; "Chornie Goose." 



This sj)ecies, like the former, seems to be a mere straggler and 

 Irregular visitor, evidently driven by high winds to rest here for a 

 brief period ere they resume their customary lines of migration along 

 the mainland. 



18. Anas boschas. Mallard Duck. 



A pair of these fine birds bred on the island of St, Paul during the 

 season of 1872, at Polavina Lake, and several were observed later in 

 the fall. Tlie mallard I also noticed on St. George Island, but the 

 natives say it is not a regular .visitor. 



19. Mareca penelope. Widgeon. 



It is an interesting fact that this widgeon, as my specimens attest, 

 which visits the Pribilof Islands is not M. americana, as might be 

 anticipated, but it is the true 31. penelope. I saw only a few speci- 

 mens, and saw them rarely. They were solitary examples, never in 

 pairs, and it does not breed on the islands. Apjjarently the few indi- 

 viduals which I noted during two years of observation were wind- 

 bound or estra3\ 



20. Harelda glacialis. Long-tailed Duck; "Saafka." 



This noisj^ chattering example is common and resident. It appears 

 everywhere on the pools, ponds, sloughs, and lakes of the two islands; 

 in limited numbers, however. The Saafka is a very lively bird, par- 

 ticularly in the spring, when with the breaking up of tlie ice it flies 

 into the open reaches of water and raises its peculiar, sonorous, and 

 reiterated cry of ali-naah-naah-yali, which rings cheerfully upon the 

 ear after the silence and desolate dearth of an ice-bound winter. 



21. Histrionicus torquatus. Harlequin Duck, 



My experience with this bird is radically different from another 

 writer, he stating that it is an essentiallj^ solitary species, found alone 

 or in pairs, only in the most retired spots, on the small rivers flowing 

 into the Yukon, where it breeds.' It is the most gregarious of all the 

 duck tribe known to these islands. Flocks of a hundred, closely 

 bunched together, may be found at every turn by the traveler on the 

 coast. Nor is it particularly wild or shy, for every morning at St. 

 George, whenever I chose to walk to the water's edge beneath the 

 village, and less than a quarter of a mile distant, I could have shot at 

 fifty or a hundred of these birds, just as I had enjoyed such an oppor- 

 tunity in the early dawning previously. But it is a remarkably silent 

 bird, and from it I never heard any cry whatever during the whole, 

 year; for it is about the island, unless the ice drives it away, 

 throughout that entire period. It is a verj^ social duck, solitary pairs 

 never being seen away from the flock. The females seem to outnum- 

 ber the males two to one; but the strangest thing about it was my 

 total inability, and that of the natives, too — for I offered an inordi- 

 nate reward — to find its eggs or nest. It must breed about here, but 

 whether deep in the rock interstices of the beach shingle, or flying by 

 night to the high ridges inland, I am ignorant, 



22. Somateria stelleri, Steller's Eider. 



From the village hill at St. Paul, in May, 1872, I shot two speci- 

 mens of this duck, and, then not knowing as much about the seal-island 



' Trans. Chicago Acad., 1, 298. 



