RED-HEAD 181 



partly on the meat of horseshoe crabs which were easily picked up at low tide near 

 his house. Mr. Frederick Gallatin has also bred the Red-head according to what 

 Mr. Lee S. Crandall tells me, and some were reared on Mr. William Rockefeller's 

 estate in 1915. I have no reason to think that this species is any harder to rear than 

 the Pochard once a good breeding strain is isolated. This duck seems to have been 

 sent alive to Europe at one time, for Heinroth mentions it and describes its voice in 

 the Berlin Zoological Gardens. Miss Hubbard (1907) says that the London Gardens 

 secured them in 1902 for the first time. Thirty to forty pairs were sent to England 

 between 1900 and 1904, selling at £4 and £6 the pair. They proved almost impos- 

 sible to acclimatize and were a poor investment. 



Some young hand-reared stock from wild-gathered eggs which I sent to Mr. 

 Wormald in 1922 laid well in 1924. The first eggs were laid at his place in Norfolk, 

 England, on April 18 and they averaged much earlier than Pochard eggs (April 28 to 

 May 3). Two females that were mated to one male laid forty-six eggs between them. 

 But perhaps the most interesting happening was the discovery that about half of 

 these eggs were laid in the nests of other ducks: Pochards, Mallards and Yellow- 

 bills. The two Red-head females made each a nest of its own but both commenced 

 to deposit eggs in the same nest. Thus the same irregular habits found in the wild 

 are perpetuated in confinement. 



Htbrids. In the wild the Red-head is known to have crossed with the Common 

 Scaup (Nyroca marila), the Ringed-necked Duck {Nyroca collaris), the Lesser Scaup 

 (Nyroca affirm) and the Hooded Merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus) (Poll, 1911). 

 Although it has doubtless been crossed with many other ducks in captivity, I know of 

 only the two following: the Ringed-necked Duck and the Mandarin Duck. Speci- 

 mens of both these crosses went through the hands of a dealer, Mr. G. D. Tilley, of 

 Darien, Connecticut, in 1909. 



Sanford (Sanford, Bishop and Van Dyke, 1903) mentions a cross between the Red- 

 head and the Carolina Duck, without saying whether it was wild or captive-bred. 



