THE GREEN-WINGED TEAL. 945 
a couple of these beautiful birds, right and left, while 
woodcock shooting, in Orange County, New York, with 
No. 8shot. They sprang quite unexpectedly from behind 
a willow bush, on the Wawayanda creek, and I dropped 
them both quite dead, somewhat to my own astonish- 
ment, and to the utter astounding of Fat Tom, who 
witnessed it, into the middle of the stream, respectively 
«+ twenty and twenty-five yards distance. Until I recov- 
ored them I supposed that they were young wood ducks, 
but on examination they proved to be young green- 
winged teal, of that season, in their immature plumage. 
This must have been in the last week of July or the first 
of August—it was many years since, and as at that time 
I kept no shooting diary, I unfortunately am unable to 
verify the exact date. The birds must, I conclude, have 
been bred in that vicinity, by what means I cannot con- 
jecture, unless that the parent birds might have been 
wounded in the spring, and disabled from completing 
their northern migration, and that this, as is sometimes 
the case with the minor birds of passage, might have 
superinduced their breeding in that, for them, far south- 
ern region. In corroboration of this I may add that, in 
the spring of 1846, a couple of these birds haunted a 
small reedy island in front of my house, on the Passaic, 
to so late a day in summer—the 29th, if I do not err, of 
May—that I sedulously avoided disturbing them, in the 
hope that they would breed there. This I yet think 
would have been the case but for the constant disturb- 
