80 
ANAS RUBRIPES 
In spite of the great hardiness of Black Ducks and their ability to glean a diet 
from the frozen salt meadows where most ducks could not live at all, they do, during 
very hard winters, often starve in New England, or become mere skeletons, entirely 
unfit for food. Fortunately this does not occur nowadays during the shooting, 
season, which ends in the north on December 31, so that they are no longer persecuted 
when in a helpless condition. 
We now occasionally hear from extremists in the conservation movement, who 
would like to put Bob-whites as well as all weed- and insect-destroyers on the song- 
bird list. They might just as well include the Black Duck among “song-birds,” for 
Eaton (1910), in his Birds of New York, tells of the stomach of a specimen, taken 
while returning from a flooded cornfield at Canandaigua Lake, that contained a 
total of 23,704 weed seeds! Of these 13,240 were pig-weeds, 7264 knot-grass, 2824 
ragweed, and 576 dock seeds! 
Courtship and Nesting. Black Ducks are not all paired in our parks about 
Boston until April. Of course birds at rest drift around in pairs by November and 
December, but as late as March 20 I have found considerable bodies of birds with a 
large excess of males, and apparently not more than half of them with mates. At 
such times one can see the courtship at its best, and it is very remarkable that its re- 
semblance to, if not identity with the Mallard’s, has seldom been noticed. In a group 
of twelve males and one female which I watched closely on March 20, 1920, at 
Chestnut Hill Reservoir, the actions were as follows: these males, who appeared to 
be in active competition, would run about on the ice, chasing and pecking at each 
other with their bills. Then they, including the lone female, would run to the open 
water where they would all “mill” about in a confused and excited mass, single 
drakes making short flights and chasing each other around in circles. These short dis- 
play-flights were well described by C. W. Townsend (1916) and indeed this is the 
most conspicuous part of the performance, possibly connected with exposure of the 
white under-wing surfaces. A bobbing of the head, as in the Mallard, is also seen. 
But if one watches closely he will see the uprearing of the body and the down thrust 
of the bill just exactly as in the Mallard. 
While these mating antics are going on I have heard the clear whistle-like note from 
the males, just like the Mallard’s whistle and entirely different from anything I ever 
heard at other times of the year. Sometimes on a quiet morning in February or 
March this whistle can be heard several hundred yards away. But it is a fact that 
the display of the Black Duck is not so easy to see as it is in the Mallard, perhaps 
because this is a much more retiring species. I have seen pinioned birds mate with 
no particular ceremony beyond active bowing movements. 
The nesting season varies from late April to mid- June, according to the season and 
the latitude. At Anticosti young have been found as early as July 3 (Verrill, 1862), 
