SPECIES 6. ANAS STREPERA. 
THE GADWALL. 
[Plate LXXI. — Fig. 1, Male.'] 
Le Chipeau, Briss. vi, p. 339. 8. pi. 55. jig. 1. — Buff, ix, 187. — 
PL Enl. 958. — ^rct. Zool. p. 575 . — Lath. Syn. iii, p. 515. — 
Peale’s Museum, JVo. 2750.* 
This beautiful Duck 1 have met with in very distant parts of 
the United States, viz. on the Seneca lake in New York, about 
the twentieth of October, and at Louisville on the Ohio, in Feb- 
ruary. I also shot it near Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. With 
its particular manners or breeding place, I am altogether unac- 
quainted. 
The length of this species is twenty inches, extent thirty-one 
inches; bill two inches long, formed very much like that of the 
Mallard, and of a brownish black; crown dusky brown, rest of 
the upper half of the neck brownish white, both thickly spec- 
kled with black; lower part of the neck and breast dusky black, 
elegantly ornamented with large concentric semicircles of white; 
scapulars waved with lines of white on a dusky ground, but 
narrower than that of the breast; primaries ash; greater wing- 
coverts black, and several of the lesser coverts immediately 
above chestnut red; speculum white, bordered below with black, 
forming three broad bands on the wing of chestnut, black, and 
white; belly dull white; rump and tail coverts black, glossed 
with green; tail tapering, pointed, of a pale brown ash edged 
with white; flanks dull white elegantly waved; tertials long, 
and of a pale brown, legs orange red. 
The female I have never seen. Latham describes it as follows : 
* vJnas strepera, Gmei. Sysl. i, p. 520, JVb. 20. — Ind. Orn. p. 849, JVo. 69. — 
Temm. Man. d’Orn. p. 837. — Bewick, ii, p. 314. — Peale’s Museum, JVo. 
2751, female. 
