BREEDING WILDFOWL. 54I 



would escape, if possible, and never return. They dis- 

 trust man after he once catches them to pinion them, 

 when a few weeks old. They have been so tame as to 

 run to meet me with a dish of bread and milk, or other 

 food, and climb into it and feed greedily until once 

 taken in hand. Then they became suspicious. No 

 bird likes to be taken in hand. The stiff quills must 

 hurt when pressed into the flesh. Pigeon men handle 

 their birds by a grip on the wings close to the body ; 

 ducks should be so handled. Domestic hens may be 

 handled by the legs. The man who takes a duck by 

 the legs will have a crippled bird that must be killed, 

 for their legs are weak, and all attempts to heal a 

 broken leg by splints or plaster bandages, by me, have 

 been failures, but then it is recorded that I am not a 

 surgeon. 



On a later trial of breeding these birds, there was a 

 train of thought something like this : In nature every 

 female breeds; with me it has been only one in ten; 

 the climate is right, for they breed here; the trouble 

 must be in the food. In western New York I have 

 ' fed corn, wheat, rye and oats, with such vegetation as 

 lettuce, purslane, "pusley," young cabbage, water- 

 cress and duckweed, all of which they were very fond 

 of, yet they laid their eggs sparingly. Evidently some- 

 thing was lacking, and then the fact that they had been 

 seen to pick insects from overhanging leaves, eat frog 

 spawn and gobble up polly-wogs and snails as well as 

 small frogs, suggested that what was needed to round 

 out their natural diet was animal food. The new ra- 



