THE POCHARD. 
133 
numerous on this lake, at the same time with quantities of wigeon, 
teal, and wild ducks. On the 8th of December, 1837, 1 saw eight 
pochards, which, with three more, had been killed at a shot on some 
water near Hillsborough, county Down. Seven of these were 
adult males, the other was a female ; of ten shot in Belfast Bay on 
the 3rd of January that year, nearly all were likewise old male birds. 
1 have remarked that a singularly large proportion of the pochards 
visiting this quarter are so; and a wild-fowl shooter, who has 
killed a great number of them at all periods of the winter in 
many years, considers that there were at least four males, old and 
young, to one female. 
At Clay Lake, a small sheet of fresh-water, distant about a mile 
from Strangford Lough, I am credibly informed that a pair of 
pochards bred in the summer of 1849, as a pair had also done 
about two summers previously. The species has occasionally 
been known for many years past to breed in Norfolk, as a few do 
annually in Holland. 
The pochard visits the sea- coast on each side of the island 
and, also, the inland waters pretty generally. My correspond- 
ents residing near the localities about to be named, consider it as 
follows : — rare in the north-west of Donegal, common in Dublin 
Bay, and not uncommon in Wexford and Waterford harbours. 
In Cork harbour it is not rare, but is so in Kerry, where it 
has been seen on Lough Beg, near the shores of Brandon Bay.~ x ' 
It has been killed on the coast of the island of Achil.t The 
species appears every winter on the rivers and fresh-water lakes of 
Connaught rather plentifully, but in detached flocks, consisting of 
from three or four to ten or a dozen birds. J “ Pochards, tufted 
ducks, and golden-eyes, as well as mallards, wigeon, and teal, are 
in flocks on the Shannon all the winter.” || 
Mr. Selby remarks of the pochard, that “in the northern parts 
of England and in Scotland it is comparatively of rare occurrence, 
either from the deficiency of some particular aquatic plants and 
* Mr. R. Chute ; — the late Mr. T. F. Neligan marked it with doubt as a 
visitant to Kerry. 
f Lieut. Reynolds, R.N., 1834. £ Mr. G. Jackson. || Rev. T. Knox. 
