JUNE 133 



I lay, a beautiful little domestic drama was being enacted, 

 which the naked eye could never have unravelled. The 

 sand-hills about the golf-links are a favourite nesting- 

 place for the sheldrake a true mariner, never happy or 

 healthy far from the brine. (Note that, my thoughtless 

 friends, who try to turn this fine bird into an ' ornamental 

 water-fowl ' by clipping his wings and setting him afloat 

 on a puddle of greasy inland water.) Three pairs of 

 sheldrakes had brought their broods across the little bay 

 to sport and feed among the spray at the foot of these 

 cliffs. Two of these pairs had seven ducklings each, 

 while the third pair had but three; and besides these 

 there was a fourth pair with no following pathetic 

 figures beside the busy parents. There was plenty of 

 elbow-room; the different families were kept severely 

 apart ; Heaven knows how the children could have been 

 sorted out aright if once they had got mixed, for they 

 were all dressed exactly alike, in yellow jackets striped 

 with brown. Their movements were swift and very 

 regular. The ducklings of each family spread out in a 

 skirmishing line, with a parent on either flank, and swam 

 rapidly across the sparkling waves, darting incessantly 

 after some prey on the surface, probably a small crus- 

 tacean. The mother ducks fed also, though not so eagerly* 

 but the drakes kept a distrustful eye cocked upwards to 

 the cliff where I lay. 



The extremely vivid colouring of the adult sheldrake 

 of both sexes suggests a problem in evolution, often pro- 

 pounded, but hitherto unsolved. In every other species 

 of duck the female wears sad-coloured raiment so as to 

 escape notice during incubation. But the female shel- 

 drake differs in appearance from the male only in respect 



