306 BAY, SEA OR DIVING DUCKS 



fledged and voracious, crowded the guano-whitened rocks; and the moth- 

 ers, with long necks and gaping yellow bills, swooped above the peaceful 

 shallows of the eiders, carrying off the young birds, seemingly just as 

 their wants required. The gull would gobble up and swallow a young 

 eider in less time than it takes me to describe the act. For a moment you 

 would see the paddling feet of the poor little wretch protruding from 

 the mouth; then came a distension of the neck as it descended into the 

 stomach; a few moments more and the young gulls were feeding on the 

 ejected morsel." Dresser (1871) says: "I know of an incident that oc- 

 curred .... when a raven (Corvus corax) struck down a sitting eider 

 duck, and, fixing his powerful claws in her neck, tried to drag her off 

 the nest. In this he would have succeeded; but the eider drake arrived 

 home and attacked the raven, whereupon a fight ensued between these 

 two, which ended in both rolling, fast in each other's clutches, down the 

 hill into the lake, where, however, the raven got loose and flew off." 



Some idea of the extent of the depredations upon the eggs of the 

 eider by the Eskimos is given by MacMillan (1918) who says: "How im- 

 patiently we awaited the discovery of those first golden nuggets in the 

 nests. Can we ever forget those annual pilgrimages to the shrine at 

 historic Littleton and Eider Duck Islands and McGarys Rock. Here, 

 among a laughing, jolly company of men, women, and children, we 

 pitched our tents among the nests; we boiled eggs, and we fried eggs, 

 and we scrambled eggs, and we did everything to eggs. In a few hours 

 4,000 delicious fresh eggs were gathered from one small island alone. 

 Cached beneath the rocks, away from the direct rays of the sun, they 

 remain perfectly fresh; they become chilled in August; and freeze hard 

 as so many rocks in September a much appreciated delicacy during the 

 long winter months. The shells are often broken and the contents 

 poured or squirted from the mouth of the Esquimo into the intestinal 

 sheath of the bearded seal or the walrus, a most nutritious sausage to be 

 eaten on the long sledge trips." 



Skins of the eider duck are used by the natives in the fashioning of 

 clothes and blankets. Describing the blankets made by the Eskimos, 

 Bent (1925) says: "They were made of the breasts of eiders from which 

 the feathers had all been plucked, leaving the down on the skins, which 

 had been cured so that they were very soft and pliable; the edges of the 

 blankets were trimmed with the cured skins of the heads of many North- 

 ern and King Eiders, making very attractive borders. They were the 

 softest, lightest, warmest, and most beautiful blankets I had ever seen, 

 and I was told that they brought such fancy prices that they were be- 

 yond the reach of ordinary mortals. I believe the natives also use these 

 plucked skins for winter underwear, wearing them with the down side 

 next to the skin; eider-down underwear and Arctic-hare stockings must 

 be very soft and warm." 



The food of the American Eider, as is the case with all the eiders, 

 is preponderantly from the animal kingdom. An analysis of the stomach 

 contents of 96 of these birds, taken in the five months January, Febru- 



