BIRDS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE 261 
one day when a big boy, my father being from home, 
a swan flew over our farm from the Castle loch and 
pitched in the River Annan, which flows along the 
eastern boundary of the farm of Priestdykes. The plough- 
man induced me to get an old flint-lock gun out of the 
house and we charged it. The gun, however, was minus the 
flmt, so I went to the house and brought a piece of live peat 
from the kitchen fire. The ploughman then levelled the 
gun at the bird over the bank of the river, and I touched the 
powder in the flash-pan of the old gun with the live peat, and 
the swan was shot dead." It is recorded that on November 
21st, 1909, when the Nith was covered with a sheet of ice 
of considerable thickness, a young Swan, one of those which 
had been for some time on the river, was found " frozen to 
death, through its having become embedded in the ice."* 
This species is believed to pair for life, and the female does 
not lay during the first year, sometimes not till the fourth 
year ; some thirty-six days are taken for the incubation of 
the eggs, which are laid in increasing numbers, from three 
or five, to ten or twelve, as the bird advances to maturity. f 
[A specimen of the Black-necked Swan (C. nigricollis, 
Gmelin) is recorded by H. A. Macpherson as having been 
shot near Dumfries early in 1891. The bird was full-winged 
and showed no signs of having been in captivity. J This 
species, a native of antarctic America, is not infrequently 
seen in coUections of ornamental wild-fowl, and the specimen 
in question was doubtless nothing more than an " escape."] 
[The Black Swan (C. atratus, Latham), a native of 
Australia, is often kept in this country in semi-captivity on 
ornamental pieces of water. A bird of this species was seen 
on the Castle Loch, Lochmaben, in the spring of 1907. 
It left in winter, but reappeared there in the following 
* Dumfries Courier and Herald, November 24th, 1909. 
t Man. Brit. Birds, 1899, p. 418. 
J Naturalist, 1892, p. 260. 
