LONG-TAILED DUCK 363 



from the lakes until they are able to fly. This is not always the case, and L. M. 

 Turner (MS.) watched a female with thirteen young only two days old conduct her 

 brood overland to the salt water, half a mile away. Hantzsch (1905) noted the great 

 mortality among the young in Iceland, when, during heavy storms, the females led 

 their broods on to the shore, where the little ones fell into holes in the rocks and be- 

 came imprisoned. 



Males leave the incubating females, but do not always retire to distant regions. 

 Like the Eiders and Scoters the Long-tails do not breed until two years old, and con- 

 sequently a good many non-breeding males are found on the nesting grounds as well 

 as far south of them. 



Status. Perhaps this duck is less abundant in some places than it was fifty or a 

 hundred years ago. I have heard such tales near home and give them little weight. 

 Even in my life-time I have seen such changes in coastal waters that I can well 

 understand how wintering sea ducks must shift ground from time to time. I have 

 seen vast areas of black mud or muddy sand, the resting place of migrant shore- 

 birds, grow up to salt-marsh; seen bare sandy brant shoals become grassy islands, 

 islands joined to beaches, and beaches made into islands. With a bird like this a 

 local wintering group may vary from one to a thousand without a particle of change 

 in its status over a hundred miles of coast. 



Scarcely any of our American ducks is safer from the hand of man than this one, 

 especially since the season of greatest abundance falls only in the last month of the 

 shooting season. The bird really requires no protection at all and is far better off, on 

 account of its scattered and un-get-at-able nesting grounds, than are the island-nest- 

 ing Eider Ducks. Its vast numbers and almost universal presence can scarcely be 

 realized by any one who is not abroad in the dead of winter. 



Enemies. In Iceland the young are followed and sometimes swallowed up by the 

 ever-present Richardson's Skua. Millais (1913) has given a good account of the 

 hunting methods employed by these destructive birds. Manniche (1910), too, speaks 

 of the downy young being preyed upon by Ravens and Glaucous Gulls in north- 

 eastern Greenland. "Between the foxes and the natives, who suck the eggs for 

 food," says W. Palmer (1899), speaking of the Pribilovs, "it is a wonder that the 

 species is so common." 



Damage. Very little if any. It seems not to eat edible shellfish such as scallops 

 in New England, or at least only in very small numbers (U.S. Biological Survey, 

 MS.). 



Food Value. This is one of the strongest-tasting of the ducks. It is just about 



