RED-HEAD 179 



I am informed. These shad nets are set in rather shallow water. I have read that 

 ducks were taken in the Chesapeake by this method years ago. 



Damage. The Red-head, like other diving ducks, very rarely interferes with 

 growing crops. I have never heard of any complaints about it in the rice-fields of 

 California or Arkansas, where, as a matter of fact, migrants arrive too late to injure 

 the grain. 



s l 



Food Value. One of the favorite topics of discussion among epicures of the past 

 generation, a race unhappily extinct in these prosaic times, was the comparative 

 merit of the Red-head and the Canvas-back as a subject for the culinary art. If in 

 those halcyon days there existed men with tastes so discriminating that they could 

 distinguish between the two, that breed has long since departed to the Happy Hunt- 

 ing Grounds, where, let us hope, they are undisturbed by prohibition and kindred 

 ailments. 



If market prices are any indication of the relative esteem in which the two species 

 were held, then the odds were certainly greatly in favor of the Canvas-back, for 

 during the last years when game was legally marketed in' eastern cities Red-heads 

 were selling at from $3.50 to $4.00 the pair, and Canvas-backs at from $6.00 to 

 $8.00 the pair. In the nineties Red-heads were not at all expensive, about $2.50 a 

 pair. In Audubon's time they sold for as little as $1.00 a pair in New Orleans and 

 seventy-five cents in Baltimore! No doubt the Canvas-back has a slight advantage 

 in flavor and texture, but aside from that it is better because it is a bigger bird and 

 because it rarely feeds in salt water. 



Audubon regarded the Red-head as far inferior to the Canvas-back and many 

 other ducks, but he is not very clear as to what he thinks of the Canvas-back. 

 Probably the best Red-heads as well as Canvas-backs came from the Gunpowder 

 and adjacent rivers on the upper Chesapeake. The Currituck Red-heads were never 

 considered quite so good, and those from Pamlico, where the water grows salt, are 

 distinctly inferior. I have eaten many New England Red-heads which were hardly 

 better than Scaups. 



Hunt. The pursuit of the Red-head is so nearly like that of the Canvas-back 

 that the reader is referred to the account of the latter for a brief survey of the meth- 

 ods used in taking them both. 



A successful method sometimes used in Massachusetts ponds for decoying Red- 

 heads and Blue-bills is interesting and worth mentioning, as it does not seem to be 

 employed elsewhere. On these ponds where permanent camps and large teams of 

 live goose- and duck-decoys are maintained, groups of wooden Scaup decoys, nailed 

 on sunken wooden triangles, are sometimes rigged to an endless line that runs out 



