482 THE EIDER DUCK. 



and the King Eider are occasionally found here on the 

 Niagara, and a mature male of the latter was once taken 

 here in April. 



Let no one think that the brilliant birds are confined 

 to the south. On our northern oceans rides the King of 

 Ducks, and also his still more stately cousin, the Common 

 Eider. The lower parts, and the crown from the base 

 of the bill, black; the upper parts, including a line into 

 the crown, white; back of the head and neck, ice-green; 

 the breast a most elegant rosy-cream, the male of 

 the Common Eider {Somateria mollissima} is a very ideal 

 of chaste beauty. The darkness of the deep beneath him, 

 the snow of the mountain above him, the ice beneath his 

 crown, and the rosy tint of the aurora borealis on his 

 breast, he is the symbol of our most intensely startling 

 and beautiful ideas of the north. 



Extending their winter habitat along our northwestern 

 coast to New York, the Eiders reach Labrador, in their 

 northward migrations, by the first days of May, two weeks 

 or more before the ice is out of that region. For the next 

 three or four weeks their low flight, in long drawn-out lines, 

 is a feature of that rough and forbidding landscape. The 

 sexes are already united in regularly chosen pairs, the dark 

 colored females contrasting strongly, as they alternate with 

 their snowy consorts in the lines of flight. To the residents 

 of Labrador, shut in by the long, bleak winter, their appear- 

 ance now is about as pleasant as is that of the Robins to 

 us in the raw days of March. After disporting themselves 

 for several weeks in the happy reminiscences of their former 

 summer haunts, they begin nidification about the last of 

 May or the first of June. Breeding in communities, some- 

 limes in immense numbers, in this respect differing notice- 

 ably from most Ducks, they appropriate the ro'cky islands 



