270 



WILD SPAIN. 



they appeared half birds, half water-tortoises, with which 

 the lagoon abounds. We were well sheltered by a fringe of 

 sedges, and presently the strangers entered a small reed- 

 margined bight, swimming very deep, only their turtle- 

 shaped backs and heavy heads in' sight. Here we crept 

 down on them, and as they sat, splashing and preening in 

 the shallow water, stopped three — two dead, the third 

 escaping, winged. They proved to be a duck and drake of 

 the White-fronted Duck — Erismatura mersa — heavily built 

 diving-ducks, round in the back, broad and flat in the 

 chest, with small wings like a Grebe, and long, stiff tails 

 like a Cormorant — the latter, being carried underwater as 

 a rudder, is not visible when the bird is swimming. The 

 enormously swollen bill of the drake — pale waxen blue in 

 colour — completed as singular a picture of a feathered 

 fowl as the writer ever came across : they were in fact no less 

 remarkable in form and colour, now we had them in hand, 

 than they had at first appeared in the water. The head 

 and neck of the drake were jet black, with white face and 

 cheeks :' otherwise -their whole plumage was dark ferrugi- 

 nous (not white below, as represented in " Bree ") and 

 with a silky, grebe-like sheen. 



These singular ducks, we found, were well known to the 

 guardas as " patos porrones" (porron — a knob), and 

 subsequently found several pairs at the Laguna de 

 Medina, a lake near Jerez, where, on the 23rd May, 

 they were evidently breeding. The lake was also occu- 

 pied by numbers of the Great Crested Grebe (Podicipes 

 cristatus), quaint-looking birds in their full summer-dress. 

 The nests of the Little Grebe may be found floating in 

 every rushy pool. 



The width of the lagoon would barely exceed half-a-mile ; 

 its shores all furrowed by wild boar in their search for grillos, 

 or mole-crickets, and dotted with the skeletons of water- 

 tortoises, and beyond its glancing waters rolled stretches 

 of grey scrub and heath, backed in the distance by sand- 

 dunes and corrales, the outliers of the desolate arenales 

 that extend to the sea-coast. Beneath a straggling belt 

 of pines there were sheltering from the mid-day heat a 



