4 Ditcher on the Labrador Duck. Lbm 



THE LABRADOR DUCK — ANOTHER SPECIMEN, 



WITH ADDITIONAL DATA RESPECTING 



EXTANT SPECIMENS. 1 



BY WILLIAM DUTCHER. 



Mr. Ernest D. Wintle, of Montreal, Canada, a member 

 of the Union, reports a heretofore unrecorded specimen of the 

 Ladrador Duck in the Museum of the Natural History Society of 

 Montreal. It is a male in immature plumage, and was evidently 

 mounted from a dried skin ; it bears no date or record as to 

 whence it was obtained. He has searched through the Journals 

 of the Society from the beginning to date and cannot find any 

 mention of the specimen therein, and no person connected with 

 the Society seems to know anything about it. 



This is the third specimen discovered since the publication of 

 my 'Revised List,' a and makes the known specimens in America 

 twenty-nine, and the total number extant forty-one. 



A less pleasant duty than the recording of a newly discovered 

 specimen of this extinct species now devolves upon me. I would 

 gladly escape the responsibility, but justice to the ornithologists 

 whom I quoted in my former paper, and also to myself, compels 

 the following remarks. Prof. Alfred Newton, in his k Diction- 

 ary of Birds,' pp. 221-223, makes the following statement under 

 the subject 'Extermination.' 



"Far less commonly known, but apparently quite as certain, 

 is the doom of a large Duck which until 1S42 or thereabouts was 

 commonly found in summer about the mouth of the St. Lawrence 

 and the coast of Labrador, migrating in winter to the shores of 

 Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, New England, and perhaps 

 further southward. There is no proof, according to the best- 

 informed American ornithologists, of a single example being 

 met with for many years past in any of the markets of the United 

 States, where formerly it was not at all uncommon at the proper 



1 Read at the Eleventh Congress of the American Ornithologists' Union, held at 

 Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 20-23, I 893- 



2 The Auk, Vol. VIII, pp. 201-216, April, 1891. 



