Or 
ANAS CRECCA.;—A. ACUTA. 54 
[§ 5571. One.—Bloxworth, Dorset, 7 June, 1878. “ Bird well 
seen. O.S. & E. N.” 
From a nest of nine eggs found on Bloxworth Heath by Mr. Salvin and my 
brother, the bird flying off almost under their feet. The former brought the 
egg unblown to Cambridge, believing it to be hard sat upon; but I found it 
had been incubated for only a few hours—not forty-eight, I believe. | 
ANAS ACUTA, Linnzus. 
PINTAIL. 
A few years ago I was very much surprised at the appearance of 
an egg given to me by a gentleman [ Mr. Henry Milner} who had 
brought it from Iceland in 1846, and assured me it was out of 
a nest from which he had himself shot a female Pintail as it rose. 
It seemed so small for the bird, was so different from eggs previously 
supposed to be genuine, and looked like what I had been accustomed 
to consider Long-tailed Ducks’. Others had been to Iceland long 
before my friend, and though I knew how carelessly eggs of the 
Ducks have often been named I hesitated to believe that the Pintail 
laid eggs so very unlike what the former voyagers had represented 
them to be. After a long talk I wrote more than one letter on the 
subject, making all kinds cf suggestions as to the possibility of 
a mistake, till at last I had heard all the circumstances and 
particulars that were so kindly related to me, and I felt sure that a 
Pintail had actually been shot, from the sitting of which that very 
ege was one. The possibility still remained that the mother might 
have been accidentally at another bird’s nest; but that its own nest 
had been close to [it and] unobserved, as at first seemed not unlikely, 
the assurances of the finder to the contrary rendered extremely im- 
probable. This single egg from Iceland I accordingly valued very 
highly, and I looked upon it in the meantime as a veritable Pintail’s, 
though this discovery of Mr. Milner’s, like all others founded upon 
single nests, perhaps still wanted confirmation. 
In common with some other ornithologists, I had long been 
almost in a state of desperation about the eggs of several of the 
Ducks, about most of those, in fact, which do not, occasionally 
at least, breed in Great Britain. Many a collector could produce 
the eggs of what Duck you please at a moment’s notice, but few, 
very few, could give any kind of satisfactory account of them. 
PART IV. 2N 
