JANUARY. 9 



wild ducks, if there have been any mild days in the 

 new year, are beginning to prospect for breeding 

 sites. Hitherto they have voluntarily formed con- 

 centration camps upon meres remote from ordinary 

 gunshot, or lakes where, as at Holkham, in Norfolk, 

 they are protected by landowners. Even in early 

 December they will wander wide in search of food 

 occasionally, for I have put one up in the middle of 

 an oak wood, where it was foraging for acorns, and 

 another from a frost-bound stubble a good two miles 

 from water of any kind suitable for a duck. But as 

 December passed into January, you could see through 

 field-glasses that the gorgeous mallards on the lake 

 became much more solicitous in attendance upon 

 their sober-hued wives ; and by the end of January 

 they are constantly tempted, when the weather is 

 favourable, to range in couples afield, to revisit the 

 scenes of last summer's nesting joys. 



THE WEDDED MALLARD. 



Then, as the days slowly lengthen towards spring, 

 and "warm spells" become more pronounced, the 

 wild ducks succumb more and more to the instinct 

 which bids them depart from their kind to rear their 

 separate families in peace and solitude, where there 

 are no rival drakes to pester the good-wife with un- 

 seemly attentions, and no unwedded ducks to tempt 

 her lord and master from his allegiance; for ducks 

 of neither sex are backward in their wooing. Thus 

 it happens that at the extreme end, as at the very 

 beginning, of the shooting season, the village gunner 



