78 ORNAMENTAL WATERFOWL. 
continental amateurs, but not, I believe, as yet in our Zoo- 
logical Gardens. 
In a paper addressed to the “ Ibis” for April, 1903, Mr. F. 
E. Blaauw writes :— 
“At a Meeting of the British Ornithologists’ Club, on March 20, 
igor (See Ball B.O.C. xi., p. §5), I exhibited an egg of the rare Ross’s 
Snow Goose ( Chen Rosszz), laid in captivity by a solitary female kept by me 
at Gooilust. A year later, through the courtesy of Dr. Heck, of Berlin, I 
received a second specimen of this species, which fortunately proved, as I 
hoped it, to be a male. The birds soon paired, and in the beginning of 
May, 1902, the female made a nest under a bush in her enclosure. The 
nest was, as is usual with Geese, a small depression in the soil, lined with 
dry grass and grass roots. Towards the end of the month the female began 
to lay, and on the 3oth, when the full complement of five eggs had been 
deposited, she began to sit. 
“So far, everything had gone as is usual with Geese, but on the 21st 
of June, in the morning—that is after 21 days’ incubation—I was much 
astonished to find that the young had already been hatched. Although I 
had bred Geese of very different sizes, from the large Chlephaga magellanica 
to the small Bernicla jubata, and of very different genera, I had never 
experienced a shorter time than 28 days as the term of incubation. Probably 
Chen Rosst? breeds very far up in the north, where the summers are short 
and the vegetation short-lived, so that the whole process of propagation of 
the species has only a restricted time for completion. This may explain why 
this species has the advantage of a week over the other kinds of Geese. 
“ The goslings are of a yellowish gray, darker ‘on the upper side and 
lighter below, and have, what makes them most conspicuously beautiful, 
bright canary-yellow heads, with the most delicate greyish sheen over them, 
caused by the extremity of the longer down-hairs being of that colour. The 
bill is black, with a flesh-coloured tip. A little spot in front of each eye is 
also blackish. The legs are olive-green. Three of the goslings were as 
described above, but two of them had the part white which in the others was 
yellow. 
‘* Although the goslings soon began to feed and grew very rapidly at 
first, I soon observed that one after the other got something wrong with its 
breathing organs, and to my great disappointment they died successively, so 
that the last was found dead a fortnight after they had been hatched. All 
that I can add is that, as is usual with goslings, the intensity of the coloura- 
tion gradually diminished as they got older, and in particular the brightness 
of the yellow of the head and the depth of the black in front of the eyes 
