38 LONDON BIRDS 



gives its peculiar picturesqueness to sunset in a big 

 town is fading in the fog is their favourite exercise 

 time; and one may stand on the Serpentine bridge 

 almost any autumn evening, and listen to Mallard 

 and Widgeon whistling overhead, till, with a very 

 small stretch of imagination, the Long Water becomes 

 a tidal harbour, and the distant roar of Oxford Street 

 changes into the break of the sea outside the sandhills. 



In St. James's Park alone, besides eight or nine 

 sorts of Geese four of them English: Brent, Bean, 

 White-fronted, and Bernicle there are, or were, very 

 lately, not less than nineteen or twenty distinct species 

 of Ducks, with five or six crosses, including one 

 beautiful one between the exquisite little Carolina and 

 red-headed Pochard. About two-thirds are British, 

 ranging in rarity from the Widgeon and Pochards 

 which still swarm in winter in the ponds and runlets 

 in many parts of the coast to the castaneous Ducks 

 and delicately-pencilled Gadwall, one of the shiest and 

 rarest of our English waterfowl. 



The list includes, besides those already mentioned, 

 Mallard, common Teal, and Garganeys, Shovellers, Pin- 

 tails, the common Shelducks which breed in the rabbit- 

 holes among the sand-hills by the sea, and the rarer 

 ' Ruddy ' species, the tufted ; and, perhaps most 

 generally attractive of all, two or three Golden-eyes, 

 with their brilliant blue-black and white plumage, and 

 the eye, like a little drop of liquid gold, which gives 

 them their name. They and the tufted and red- 

 headed Pochards are the life of the party, and are 



