General Notes. 
189 
BucErHALA islandica and Bucephala clangula. — Recently my 
attention was drawn, by Mr. Welch, to the peculiar shape of the feathers 
which form the white scapular band in the male Barrow’s Golden-eye. In 
this species the scapular feathers are white along the shaft, and black on ore 
or both edges, usually both. In the second species these feathers are also 
white along the shaft, and black-edged, but in the. Barrow’s Golden-eye the 
terminal part of the white breaks off, and leaves the black edges projecting 
beyond ; so that the end of the feather is of much the same shape that a 
longitudinal section of the lower half of a champagne bottle would be. 
This breakage does not take place in the common Golden-eye. 
In view of the general similarity of these two birds, such a simple char- 
acter of the male Barrow’s Golden- eye is not without interest That the 
lio-ht-colored barbs of a feather break more easilv than the dark barbs is 
o * 
well shown in the worn plumages of our Golden Woodpeckers and in the 
genus Totcinus. But the shedding that takes place in the Golden-eyes is 
not of this class, but belongs to the same class as that which takes place 
in the red nuchal patch of some Woodpeckers. In the case of the 
Golden-eyes the color of the back is considerably darkened. 
This peculiarity has held good for all the specimens examined by me, 
some seven or eight in number. — J. A. Jeffries, Boston , Mass. 
The King Eider ( Somateria spectabilis ) on the Californian 
Coast. — As there is no record of the occurrence of this species on the 
Pacific Coast from any point south of Alaska, the capture of a specimen 
last winter off Blackpoint, San Francisco, is a matter of interest. The 
specimen came into possession of my friend, Mr. D. S. Bryant, who says 
that it is the first instance of the presence of the species in this latitude that 
has come to his knowledge. The unusually severe winter on this coast 
explains, he thinks, the unusual event. I believe that this and several 
other species of Water birds with similar Northern ranges are to be looked 
for as more or less regular visitants to the Californian coast, concerning 
the ornithology of which much remains to be added before our information 
is as full as it is of most portions of the Eastern coast. — H. W. Hen- 
shaw, Washington , D. C. 
Capture of the Glaucous Gull ( Larus glaucus ) on Long Island, 
N. Y. — I procured a specimen of this handsome Arctic species in Fulton 
Market, New York, on March 4, 1880. It had been brought in on that 
day from Long Island; where it was shot. It is an excellent example of 
the condition described by Richardson as L. hutchinsi, and which Mr. 
Geo. N. Lawrence has previously recorded from Long Island (Ann. Lyc. 
Nat. Hist., Yol. VIII, p. 299). Hutchins’s Gull is considered by Mr. 
Howard Saunders (see his review of the Larinoe, in Proceedings of the 
Zoological Society of London, 1878) to be that very brief stage through 
which L. glaucus passes in changing from the immature to the adult 
plumage. This state is so uncommon that I append a description of my 
