172 British Birds, with their Nests and Eggs 



The down in wliicli the eggs are bedded is entirely supplied from the breast of the 

 female, it is dusky-brown or mouse-colour, with whitish centres, so elastic that a 

 tiglitly compressed handful will fill an ordinary sized hat. The down taken from 

 a dead bird is said to have lost its elasticity.* Two pounds is amply sufficient 

 to make a quilt for a double bed. The nests are stripped three times, but the 

 first gathering is superior to the second and third, and the yield of cleaned down 

 during the season is about a quarter of a pound to a nest ; the third taking is 

 left till the last clutch of eggs laid by the duck are hatched oflF. The market 

 value is from fifteen to even thirty kroner a pound ; I paid twenty shillings a 

 pound for cleaned Eider down, at Bergen, this year, (1896). Incubation lasts 

 twenty-eight days; when the young are hatched the mother leads them at once 

 to the sea, and may often be seen floating low with her downy darlings on her 

 back ; and the duties of incubation being completed, she soon resumes all her natural 

 wildness and shyness of man. The old males separate altogether from the females 

 and young after the. breeding season. 



Mrs. Peary, ("My Arctic Journal"), on July 2nd, 1891, at the Duck Islands, 

 just before entering Melville Bay, gathered forty-three pounds of Eider down in 

 five hours. The boat crew also took 960 eggs, only 150 of which were found 

 good. The numbers were three to six in each nest. The down was found of the 

 greatest value and use in the extreme cold of the long and dreary arctic night. 

 The eggs are considered a great delicacy, but they have a strong taste and are 

 not equal, I consider, in flavour to those of the Guillemot, yet they prove a very 

 desirable addition to the food supply of Arctic explorers. The greatest enemies 

 of the young Eider are the large predatory Gulls. Dr. Hayes, in the " Open 

 Polar Sea," says :— " Near the Littleton Island of Captain Inglefield, we saw a 

 number of Ducks, both Eiders and Hareldas. A rugged little ledge, which I 

 named Eider Island, was so thickly colonized that we could hardly walk without 

 treading on a nest. We killed with guns and stones over two hundred birds in 

 a few hours ; it was near the close of the breeding season. The nests were still 

 occupied by the mother birds ; but many of the young had burst the shell, and 

 were nestling under the wing, or taking their first lessons in the water-pools. 

 Some, more advanced, were already in the ice-sheltered channels, greedily waiting 

 for the shell-fish and sea-urchins, which the old bird busied herself in procuring 

 for them. Near by was a low and isolated rock ledge, which we called Hans 

 Island. The Glaucous Gulls, those Cormorants of the Arctic seas, had made it 

 their peculiar homestead ; their progeny, already fully fledged and voracious, 



* Saxby ("The Birds of Shetland ") says there is no difference, and that the contrary is merely the inven- 

 tion of dishonest dealers. Macgillivray goes further and thinks the down from a dead bird superior in elasticity. 



