264 SKETCHES OP EUROPEAN ORNITHOLOGY. 



Cygnus ferus, Ray. Anas Cygnus, Linn, the species represented in 

 the plate under present notice. — And 4th, Bewick's Swan, Cygnus 

 Bewickii, Yarr. a native of Europe generally, and differing from the 

 Whistling Swan in being less in size, in the form and markings of 

 the bill, in having eighteen instead of twenty tail feathers, and in the 

 greater extent to which the trachea extends into the body of the ster- 

 num.* — Selby states that both the Cygnus ferus and the Cygnus 

 Bewickii are natives of the northern parts of America. This, how- 

 ever, is not the case. The two Wild Swans of North America are 

 the Cygnus Americanus, Sharpless, and the Cygnus buccinator, 

 Richardson ; both of which are allowed to be perfectly distinct from 

 their European relatives. — Of the habits and manners of the Whistl- 

 ing Swan, or Hooper, nothing need be said. It is an annual winter 

 visitor to our island, frequenting rivers and sheets of water, often in 

 considerable flocks ; and the vast numbers both of this species and 

 C. Bewickii seen and shot in England during the late winter, 

 1837-38, may be regarded as affording an index of the severity of 

 the season in the higher latitudes, whence they were driven south- 

 wards in multitudes. 



Black Scoter, Oidemia nigra, Flem — Canard macreuse, Fr — 

 Die Trauer-ente, G. The figure of this well-known species is very 

 characteristic : it represents a male, of the natural size, tranquilly 

 floating on the water, from the depths of which it obtains its prey. — 

 A native of the arctic regions, the Black Scoter visits our seas and 

 those of Holland, France, &c. in great numbers, during the autum- 

 nal migrations of the flocks southwards, and again in the spring, on 

 their return to the north : numbers also stay with us during the 

 whole of the winter, and take their departure with the return of 

 spring, when the morasses and lakes within the arctic circle, undis- 

 turbed by man, are unlocked and offer an asylum. Like the rest of 

 the section of oceanic Ducks to which the present belongs, its flesh 

 is nauseous and unfit for food. It subsists principally on bivalves, as 

 the Common Mussel. We have often examined the gizzard of this 

 bird : it is lined internally with a strong tough coriaceous membrane 

 of considerable thickress ; its muscular parietes are of prodigious 

 depth and solidity : the whole forms a mill, of which the two parts 

 work upon each other, grinding between them the enclosed Mussels 

 and crushing them to pieces. 



Green Sandpiper, Totanus ochropus, Temra. — Tringa ochropus, 

 Gmel Le Chevalier cul blanc, Fr. — Punktierte strandlaiifer, G. — 



" See Yarrell, in Trans. Linn. Soc. 12, 445. 



