THE LOFODEN ISLANDS 227 



feeding in-shore. Between two fresh-water lakes 

 it generally flies out of shot, but coming in from the 

 sea, especially if there is a head wind, it often comes 

 over low. The great difficulty in securing one of 

 these birds in the present locality was that the 

 Goosander passed at points on the long sea wall and 

 the inner lake barrier which varied from day to day. 

 It is easy to command a neck, but it is not easy to 

 fix the exact place in a wall some 500 yards long 

 over which birds may pass at any point. After 

 two failures, when the faithful Ericksen tried to 

 drive the Goosanders (which I had previously spied 

 feeding in the Salt Lake) over the lake barrier, I 

 made observation of the passage of the birds across 

 the sea wall on their advent from the sea itself. 

 After seeing them pass up and down for several 

 days, I noticed that they generally crossed at one 

 of two points. The most likely of these was at a 

 spot in the centre of the wall where a convex band 

 brought sea and inner estuary close together. Sea 

 ducks always choose such a place to fly over. On 

 August 22nd I walked across the lake barrier and 

 ascertained that no Goosanders were on the lake 

 itself. This meant that they would come up at 

 half tide. A walk of a mile took me to my point 

 on the sea wall, and I had hardly got there and 

 settled myself in a nice declivity, when to my 

 intense disappointment I saw no fewer than ten 

 male Goosanders pass over the sea wall some 

 200 yards to my right and go up-wind to the Salt 

 Lake. I thought that those birds constituted the 

 stock in the district, but about ten minutes later 

 a single old male crossed the barrier only just 

 out of shot to my right. An hour went by and the 



