THE TEAL. 12 7 



suddenly making down as if intending to pitch and as rapidly ascending to their 

 former level, finally when satisfied they descend very quickly and instantly settle 

 with elevated wings on the water.* Although easily approached in the day time 

 with ordinary precautions, I have always found them much more wary and on the 

 alert at night, and it has been very seldom, when walking the streams and springs 

 for Mallard on moon-light nights, that I have been able to get a shot at Teal, 

 although conscious by their calls that numbers were on the wing at no great 

 distance. 



The nest is placed sometimes close to water, but more frequently at some 

 distance, amongst trees, in long grass, gorse, or heather, and amongst sedges on 

 spongy wet moor-lands. The materials are decayed sedges and reeds, or dead 

 grasses and fragments of heather. The eggs vary in number from ten to fifteen, 

 and are deeply bedded, when the full complement is completed, in a dense cushion 

 of down, dark brown with a white centre, the eggs creamy-white with sometimes a 

 tinge of green. A Teal's nest is a most beautiful object, the whole structure and 

 closely packed eggs in a space which the two hands will easily cover ; incubation 

 lasts for three weeks. Both parent birds shew great attachment to their young 

 brood, the female stumbling and fluttering close to the feet of an intruder in 

 attempts, often successful, to draw him from her treasures. In July the males 

 gradually acquire the "eclipse" plumage, which resembles that of the females, and 

 they are later than other Ducks in acquiring the new feathers of the autumn 

 moult. They are never in finer or more complete plumage than in January. 



Their food is various, aquatic plants, insects and larvae, small mollusca, worms, 

 and the seeds of various cereals and grasses, and also the seeds of Zostera marina, 

 the common grass-wrack of the coast. The foreign immigrants arrive on our 

 coast about the middle of October to the end of the first week in November, a 

 period after which, as a rule, all migrations of birds on to the east coast ceases. 

 Compared with other land Ducks, Teal are very impatient of cold weather, and 

 quickly change their quarters on the outbreak of frost and snow ; without access 

 to water they very soon perish. In the early part of March they begin to move 

 northward again, but do not reach their most northern breeding quarters till the 

 ice is breaking up. 



Mr. St. John has found the nest, generally in the vicinity of some swamps, in 

 a tuft of heather, or in some grassy and elevated spot ; sometimes, however, in a 

 wood, at a very considerable distance from water, in situations where it is a 



* In his " Letters to Young Shooters," Sir R. Payne-Gallwey estimates the flight of the Teal as equal, on 

 occasions, to 150 miles an hour, and gives his reason for this conclusion. I see no reason to doubt the correct- 

 ness of this, and believe with him that the pace at which some Ducks and Golden Plover travel is much 

 under-estimated. 



