° 1918" ] Kennakd, Ferruginous Stains on Waterfowl. 129 



I have found no record from there. They have, however, been 

 taken in Labrador and a breeding female and downy young were 

 secured in north Greenland. Wherever their summer range may 

 be, the only unstained specimens examined were young birds taken 

 early in October; while over ninety-five per cent of them, both 

 immature and adult, come south discolored about their heads; and 

 a majority of them also about their tibiae, bellies, and breasts, with 

 a stain that must have been acquired after their summer moult, 

 either upon their breeding grounds or somewhere in their northern 

 range. As they come south later than the Lesser Snow Goose, 

 usually not arriving on the Atlantic Coast before the latter part of 

 December, they have apparently had more time to acquire the 

 stain, which is usually much heavier than in the case of the Lesser 

 Snow Goose, which arrives south in October. Prof. Cooke writes 

 that "there is no sharply defined line in the Mississippi Valley 

 between the winter ranges of the greater and the lesser forms. In 

 general the greater snow goose is' more common east of the Missis- 

 sipi River, and winters from southern Illinois to the Gulf." 



The Greater Snow Goose doubtless occurs as a straggler along 

 the Mississippi Valley, just as we occasionally get a Blue Goose or 

 a Lesser Snow Goose on the Atlantic Coast; I have seen a number 

 of specimens erroneously tagged Chen hyperboreus nivalis; but out 

 of the large series of skins examined I have seen only two from the 

 Central States really referable to that subspecies, and these had 

 wandered clear out to Dakota. 



These birds seem to winter along the Atlantic Coast from New 

 Jersey to North Carolina, feeding there along the sandy beaches, 

 or adjacent flats thrown up by the action of the sea, and presum- 

 ably free from iron deposit. 



The breeding range of the Ross's Goose is, like that of the Greater 

 Snow Goose, still unknown; but wherever it may be in the far 

 north, while this bird is not so frequently discolored as its larger 

 cousins, the Greater Snow Geese, a small proportion of them do 

 acquire the stain sometime after the summer moult, which they 

 bring to California, and like their cousins, the Lesser Snow Geese, 

 lose it there, when they start moulting. 



The breeding range of the Emperor Goose extends along the west 

 coast of Alaska from the Kotzebue Sound south to the Kuskoquim 



