WILDFOWL AND WILDFOWLING 
are few in numbers, I have known them remain at sea throughout 
almost their entire sojourn with us, depending for their food on the grass 
plucked by wigeon during the night, and carried out to them by the 
succeeding ebb. 
One other class of fowl remains to be noticed ere completing this brief 
summary, to wit, the divers. Under this comprehensive term are here 
comprised several of the duck -tribe— some of these quite important to 
the gunner, such as, for example, the golden-eye and scaup ducks, the 
pochard and tufted duck — ^though in my long experience I have always 
found the two last-named distinctly averse to salt water — they never 
resort thereto till driven by ice and frost from inland lakes and marshes. 
There are other diving ducks, such as the scoters, the eider, and the long- 
tailed ducks; but these rarely or never appear inside harbours or in 
sheltered waters where alone the punt -gunner can operate. The true 
home of these is the open sea, and their pursuit is only to be essayed under 
canvas. 
Divers of all denominations — ^whether sea -ducks or mergansers, cor- 
morants, grebes, or the Colymbi — by their nature are driven to avoid the 
oozes, mudflats and shallows with which we have been hitherto con- 
cerned. Their resorts are exclusively the deep-water channels and tide- 
ways, as well as the adjacent seas, where hardly a winter’s day will pass 
afloat without the gunner meeting with some one or other of these beauti- 
fully specialized creatures. Many of these never go ashore at all — their 
whole winter is spent afloat. This applies specially to the big sea-divers 
{Colymbi) and the grebes, whose feet, in all probability, never touch dry 
land save only during a few weeks at the nesting season.* A similar remark 
would apply to other sea -fowl which fall outside our present ken, such as 
guillemots, razorbills, auks and puffins. 
Haunts and habits . — The chosen haunts of wildfowl differ from those of 
all others in being (1) absolutely dead-flat, and (2) devoid of all covert. On 
tidal areas no covert can grow. Of marine plant -life there is abundance ; 
but, owing to the conditions of its existence, its growth is necessarily re- 
cumbent. At full flood the various algae and sea -grasses stand erect or 
wave sidelong in the currents, so long as they are water-borne and sup- 
ported by the tide. At such times the Zostera marina^ or sea -wrack, clothes 
many a thousand acres of ooze with a splendid sub -aquatic forest five or 
six feet in height. But the exquisite beauty of all marine plant -life — so 
* 1 remember once seeing a grebe {Podicipes cristatus) ashore. 
E££ 
393 
