WILDFOWL AND WILDFOWLING 
grates on a gravel beach. An hour passes. Excepting only a few thousand 
teal, the bulk of the game-ducks — always alert and mobile-— have now 
passed on elsewhere to some undisturbed resort; but the hordes of 
diving-ducks, being more local and “strongly haunted,’’ refuse to quit. It is 
to these, one now has opportunity to observe, that the recurrent cata- 
clysms are due. Watch that mob careering through the skies — there are 500 
of them, all pochards. Suddenly their onward flight is changed- — changed 
in a flash, simultaneous as automata — and every unit of those 500 is 
plunging downwards in mad vertical descent. And the shriek of opposing 
air, rent by a thousand indrawn collapsed pinions resounds through space, 
like the tearing asunder of a thousand sheets of canvas. 
By what conceivable means it is possible for immense bodies of heavy 
birds proceeding at topmost speed, and in massed formations, thus to 
change course in full career, instantaneously, and with never an accident 
or collision, passes human comprehension. Suffice it to say that they do 
it. Mobs of teal, thousands strong, flash from white to black, then white 
again (according as backs or breasts are presented), twenty times in a 
minute — and moving all the time at a velocity I shall not estimate. Dunlings, 
as already indicated, are equally marvellous acrobats. The quick change 
from black to white is so continuous that a mass of them — say a quarter - 
mile long— trills like a cinematograph, a score of alternating silvery spaces 
flashing from fore to aft backwards along their lines. Picture a long cylin- 
der painted black and white in diagonal bands: now make it revolve 
on its longer axis, and you get a somewhat similar effect. 
To return to our pochards — so far as it is possible for human eye to 
follow lightning evolutions, and usually at some distance, the collapsed 
wings are held rigidly parallel, the primaries indrawn till their tips show 
inside the secondaries. 
On British coasts the most abundant of the diving-ducks are the Scaup 
and Golden-eye, which arrive in October, and may be distinguished thus: 
Scaup (generally squandered in loose order) present a brown appearance, 
punctuated by the white “ canvas backs ” of the old drakes showing up 
conspicuously amidst the dark majority — golden-eyes, on the other hand, 
showing slate -blue, and never an old drake among them. Moreover both 
the young and female scaups (which constitute three -fourths of their 
company), carry the clean-cut white foreheads, which feature can be 
distinguished with a good glass at 200 yards; and, if flying, the white 
speculum is seen to extend across the whole wing— as it also does in tufted 
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