44 The Natural History of British Ducks 
modes of life, will pay little attention to a vegetable diet, but live almost 
exclusively on animal food. Such I find to be the case with the birds living 
on the sandy coast near the town of Dornoch in Scotland, where all conditions 
are purely marine. The Wigeon here feed by day and live entirely on 
small cockles. This renders their flesh poor, bitter, and quite uneatable. I 
have shot a good few of them there and found all to be the same, whilst 
birds from the other side of the same firth, and living on the Zostera 
beds to the west of Tain, were fat and as good as Wigeon generally 
are. In spring Wigeon are great grass-eaters, and later on, like Teal and 
Garganey, they devour an enormous quantity of flies. One day in Iceland I 
observed with a telescope a small party of male Wigeon whose wives were 
engaged in domestic affairs, paddling along the edge of a small lake near 
Myvatn, and picking the flies off the stones in hundreds. This particular 
insect, a sort of stinging house-fly, is very nutritive and tastes like a piece of 
sugar. As you are obliged to eat plenty of them yourself, for they are always 
getting into your mouth, you soon get used to them, and swallow them with 
equanimity, and it is a common sight to see the Icelandic children of the 
Myvatn district picking these natural lollipops off their faces and eating 
them by dozens. 
In certain northern firths, where Wigeon and Brent geese frequent the 
same ground, it is no uncommon sight to see Wigeon in small parties of half 
a dozen 'jackalling' the food which has been torn up by the large birds. 
The Brent can reach far below the surface and tear up the Zostera and they 
themselves only eat the root and allow the fronds to drift away. These are 
eagerly devoured by the Wigeon when they are hungry. 
Of the general appearance, the sporting capabilities, and flying powers of 
the Wigeon I shall not speak again, as these points are fully dealt with in the 
first volume of this series.^ I shall therefore only touch on certain points 
in connection with the natural history of the birds that have come under my 
notice. 
^ The Wild- fowler in Scotland. 
