Mottled dvoc, 9^ 



birds feeding on the sand beaches and mud flats off 

 Milford, Conn., where their chief food must have been 

 the winkles that are so abundant there. 



The black duck is not common in the interior, though 

 it has been reported from near York Factory. Dr. 

 Yarrow has reported it from Utah, but these birds 

 were perhaps mottled duck {A. f. maculosa). I, per- 

 sonally, have not seen it west of Nebraska, and then 

 only on a very few occasions. The specimens then 

 noted may have been mottled ducks. It is occa- 

 sionally taken in Iowa and Minnesota, but so seldom 

 that most duck shooters do not know the species. Oc- 

 casionally a man, whose experience extends over 

 fifteen or twenty years of gunning there, will say that 

 he has seen a bird two or three times. It has been re- 

 ported as breeding in great numbers about forty miles 

 north of Winnipeg, Manitoba. 



In mild winters the black duck remains throughout 

 the season in Massachusetts and Connecticut, but 

 sometimes, if the cold is bitter and long-continued, the 

 ice covers its customary feeding grounds, and its food 

 becoming very scarce, it grows so thin that gunners 

 refuse longer to kill it. At such times it sits off shore 

 in the sea, or, if the ice extends very far out from the 

 shore, upon the ice, and almost starves to death. We 

 have once or twice seen birds caught in muskrat traps 

 which were nothing more than skeletons covered by 

 feathers. 



In New England the black duck is considered one of 

 the most acute of all our fowl and is very difficult of 



