278 A DAY ON A NORFOLK MERE 



the bird has begun to sit, and then all the eggs 

 which he does not eat are spoiled ; I will give him 

 a dose of poison to-night." I have often pleaded 

 for, and have often saved, this quaint and interest- 

 ing, and often quite harmless, little animal from a 

 murderous keeper's heels ; but I feel, in this 

 instance, where the destruction is so great and 

 the guilt so evident, it would be useless to say 

 a word in his defence. 



We now come down again to the big sheet of 

 water, intending, as we return, to search carefully 

 its opposite side. The water here is much 

 deeper between the tussocks of sedge, and we are 

 often up to our knees in it. The island in which 

 we had suspected that the pin-tailed duck would be 

 laying, turned out to be quite inaccessible. We had 

 not found yet a tufted duck's nest ; but just as it oc- 

 curred to me that we had not done so, there rose, first, 

 one female, then a second, and then a third of this 

 beautifully pied bird from a thick reed-bed about 

 twenty yards behind us. We thought that there 

 must be three nests, but, in so difficult a spot, we 

 were satisfied when we succeeded in discovering 

 one, containing nine eggs. This ended the list of 

 my new finds. We moved several wild ducks who 

 had already hatched their eggs, and who tried to 



