Scaup Duck 
77 
with a few very rapid movements, and then ran a few paces towards the water in a stooping 
attitude, then raising the head and neck, and taking a good look round, they would appear 
satisfied, and waddle slowly to the water. On June 30th there were fresh eggs, which we 
ate daily, and young just hatched. The females led their young to the water almost at once. 
Messrs. H. J. and C. E. Pearson {Ibis, 1895, p. 243) state that the male Scaup in some 
cases helped the females to lead the young to the water, but I never saw any male come 
near the female after she had actually hatched her young. I have seen male Shoveller 
and Teal get quite excited when the female with young, just hatched, was threatened, but 
in every case the male bird flew right away in a few moments. There were a few male 
Scaup, doubtless the husbands of sitting hens, on the river below my camp, but they 
never took the smallest notice of any females with young that came near them. 
I find that I only made a few notes as to the nests and eggs of these ducks. Taking 
twelve nests close to the camp, the average number was 7 to 10. Hantzsch gives the 
usual number for Iceland as 8 to 11. Nineteen eggs have been found in one nest in 
Iceland {Ornithologist, p. 1 26), and there is another record of one of 22 eggs in one nest 
{Naumannia, 1857, p. 44). 
Riemschneider gives a pleasant picture of the habits of Scaup at the Icelandic breeding 
places in Ornitk. Moitatsschrift, 1896, p. 309. He says : — 
*' The males, in their attractively coloured wedding plumage, recognisable from afar, held together in 
small companies on the surface of the water, keeping a watchful eye on any males which approached, or 
moved round singly, while endeavouring to approach the females which were not already laid claim to 
for breeding purposes, with overtures of love. This, however, as a rule did not take place in the stormy 
way it does with most species, e.g. the hyemalis-Ei^peln, in comparison with which the behaviour of the 
Anas marila is very quiet and restrained. Where a mother-bird was busied over food-getting, whether 
she had left her eggs only for a short time, or whether it was not yet able to sit, one male also regularly 
appeared and came up close to the duck meeting him, meantime waiting and keeping very quiet and 
patient, and only now and then drew the attention of his chosen one to himself by a gentle, low 
' uhu, uhu.' 
" The males, too, at this time were not really wild (shy) ; they could be approached when on a lake 
by a boat as nearly as twenty paces before they would fly away. In the last days of June they began to 
exchange the ' glory ' plumage for the not-at-all showy autumn one, and the approaches to the females 
ceased more and more at the same time, and the males withdrew almost entirely from the vicinity of the 
breeding places back on to the open sea again. When I arrived at Skutustadir, on the 20th June, fresh 
eggs were still being laid. The A^ias marila were most of them still busy over laying, and collections 
of fresh eggs were still being made ; but the laying of eggs must have begun much earlier, for almost 
all the nests I saw had their full allowance of down. This lining is, however, begun by the duck when 
the first egg is laid, and completed during the laying of the next ones, so that it is only the last eggs 
of the first sitting which are laid on a completely-finished layer of down. If, therefore, an incomplete 
sitting is found in a finished nest, the nest must previously have been robbed (/2V.). The first young at 
the down stage appeared just before I left the Myvatn, that is, at the beginning of July. 
"In collecting the eggs. Pastor J., in Skutustadir, always left four or five remaining in every nest 
of the Fuligula ; the mother then always hatched out her brood, and would seek out the same place again 
next year, as he confided to me. In other places they were treated less sparingly, when the mother was 
left at most three eggs to sit on. The females of the Fuligula marila sit on their eggs with the utmost 
constancy, and only seldom leave them to get a little food, and soon return to them again ; these are 
always covered and kept warm during her absence with the projecting edge of the down lining, so that 
such a sitting, left temporarily, has the appearance of a longish-oval, plate-shaped hollow in the ground, 
filled with balls of down. People collecting the eggs do the same thing if they have taken a quantity 
of eggs from the nest. This covering of the eggs is not performed if she is scared off the nest, and she 
