520 BIKDS OF SOMERSETSHIRE. 



and females at Mrs. Tuiie's shop, which had heen 

 shot in the marsh and brought to her for preserva- 

 tion. A very fine old male bird in my collection 

 was shot in the marsh, not very far from Taunton, 

 by an innkeeper of that town, in the middle of 

 January, 1867. Yarrell says of these birds that they 

 are rare visitors to the South of England, but that 

 they have been killed in hard winters in Cornwall, 

 Devonshire and Dorsetshire : for my own part I do 

 not consider them such rare visitors to the south of 

 Devon, for I have seldom made a winter birding ex- 

 pedition to Exmouth without seeing at least one or 

 two small flocks of these birds, even though the 

 weather was not particularly severe ; but on that 

 open water they were excessively wild, and I never 

 got a chance of having a shot at them. They 

 seemed generally to keep in small flocks, some of 

 them constantly diving for food, which appears to 

 consist almost entirely of fish : amongst fresh-water 

 fish trout and roach have been mentioned, in the 

 pages of the * Zoologist,' as having been found in 

 the throat of the Goosander. It appears to be a 

 more truly migratory species than the Kedbreasted 

 Merganser, not remaining to breed in any part of 

 England, or I believe in Scotland, south of the 

 Orkneys and Shetlands. 



According to Yarrell, this bird is very fond of 

 selecting the hollow trunk of an old rotten tree as a 

 place for making its nest, and this propensity seems 



