159 
THE SMEW. 
White Nunc 
Bed-headed Smew and Lough Diver (females and young males) , 
Mergus albellus, Linn. 
Is a very rare winter visitant to the north ; but an an- 
nual one to some of the central parts of the island. 
A similar difference prevails, not only between Scotland and 
England comparatively, but between the northern and southern 
parts of the latter country. Sir William Jardine remarks : — “ In 
Scotland it can only stand as an occasional straggler,”* and Mr. 
Selby observes : — “ In severe winters the smew is not uncommon 
in the eastern and southern parts of England : * * * in the north- 
ern counties it is always of rare occurrence.”! Montagu, in the 
Supplement to his work, says of the smew : — “ This is by far the 
most plentiful species of merganser that frequents our coasts and 
fresh- waters in the winter ;” — it will be remembered that he wrote 
from Devonshire. 
In the north of Ireland, this bird is instead “ by far the rarest ” 
of the three species of Mergus. To Mr. Templeton it was 
altogether unknown as a ^visitant to the island ; nor was it 
recorded as such until I noticed it in the f Proceedings of the 
Zoological Society of London 3 in 1834. The first specimen 
which came under my inspection was a beautiful adult male, shot 
about the Long Strand, Belfast Bay, in the winter of 1829-30. 
About the last day of Eebruary, 1832, two were seen on a river 
called the Six-mile Water, near Doagh, county of Antrim, and 
one (an old male) killed. In August 1836, the gamekeeper at 
Tollymore Park (Down), described a bird to me which he had 
shot on the river there in winter about five years previously, that 
must have been a female smew in adult plumage. A specimen 
obtained about this period was said to have been killed in the 
* c Brit. Birds,’ vol. iv. p. 175. 
f Vol. ii. p. 386. 
