276 Murphy, Anatidce of South Georgia. [jujy 



Islands (South Orkneys), lay but a single egg as against the larger 

 sets of their northern congeners. It would seem, as a rule, that 

 birds whose downy young are particularly liable to fall a prey to 

 such enemies as predatory carnivores, fish, or turtles, e. g. many 

 northern waterfowl, lay a large number of eggs; but that southern 

 species, among which the chief source of danger lies in the destruc- 

 tion of the eggs before hatching, either by exposure to the perpet- 

 ually chilly weather, or discovery by the skua, have uniformly 

 small sets. Many northern water birds are known to cover their 

 eggs with down or vegetation and to abandon them temporarily. 

 At South Georgia, where the equalized, mean annual temperature 

 is close to the freezing point, even brief exposure means certain 

 death to the eggs, as I observed in the penguin colonies. Under 

 these conditions, it is obvious that a small number of eggs can be 

 more successfully incubated than a large number. It must be 

 admitted, however, that the application of this rule to the one-egg 

 sets of certain tropical birds, such as Gijgis and An'ous, is rather 

 obscure. 



I seldom if ever saw more than two dozen South Georgia teals 

 during one day, and I should say that although the species is com- 

 mon, and well distributed along the temperate coast of the island, 

 it has never attained the abundance and relative dominance of its 

 counterpart, Dafila eatoni, at the somewhat less polar region of 

 Kerguelen Island in the southern Indian Ocean. At Kerguelen, 

 British officers of the Transit of Venus Expedition are said to have 

 shot more than two thousand teals within a radius of eight miles. 

 Such a slaughter could not be duplicated at South Georgia, al- 

 though both von den Steinen and Lonnberg report that in winter 

 the teals gather in flocks of a hundred or more along the shores of 

 the fiords. The latter writer says also that the males are more 

 numerous than the females, a statement which my observations 

 tend to confirm. 



Chloephaga magellanica (Gmel.). 



The upland goose is an introdviced species at South Georgia, a 

 few pairs having been imported from the Falkland Islands in 1910 

 or 1911 by Mr. J. Innes Wilson, British Magistrate at Cumberland 



