some spontaneous Variations in Mallard ct Muscovy Ducks. 85


i


the tame bird’s ambitions do not usually go beyond sitting on the

fence. This led to the loss of some of them ; some were sold with

their mother, and one, which showed the least white on the head,

was mated with her father, the wild drake. She had grown up to

be very like her father, being slighter in body than the tame race,

but as she became adult she developed some bare red skin at the

base of the bill and just round the eye, but not a full bare face ;

moreover she got some white speckling on the head (white on the

head does not develop, so far as I have seen, in the first plumage,

even in fully white-headed Muscovys) and had olive-yellow feet.


Her offspring were normal in the down, but most were sold

early, and the one female retained for breeding resembled her so

closely, still showing a little white speckling and red skin on the

head, and pale feet, that she might have been her sister instead

of her daughter. Probably in consequence of being so closely in-

bred, her daughter never laid, pined away, and is now dead. Mean¬

while the Society had acquired another pair of Muscovy ducks,

also from South America, but this time obviously, from their heavy

forms, of domestic origin ; their colour was peculiar, a shaded

brown, much like a “poker-work” scorched picture; the drake,

whose eye-patch was black with red eyebrows, had not fully

developed the white wing-patch, but the female had, and was

fully adult. She had a red eye-patch and dark eyes, while the

half-wild female and her three-quarter-wild offspring' had light hazel

eyes like the wild drake. These birds soon moulted into the dark

green-black plumage of the wild bird, and the drake acquired the

full white wing patch like his mate ; she also had from the first a

white patch on the front of the neck. The brown colour must have

been due to fading under a hot sun ; they never assumed it again

here. When the three-quarter-bred wild female was mated to her

grandfather, the half-bred wild bird was paired with the above tame

drake as well as his own original cotnpanion. Both became

mothers of ducklings, those of the half-wild bird being normally

black and yellow, assuming the white-edged under-plumage when

feathering, and judging from the one drake kept till adult age, fol¬

lowing the normal course of developments the nasal caruncle was

still smaller than in the wild bird.



