SCOTER DUCK. 
169 
numbers, diving after their favourite food, and soon get entan- 
gled in the nets. Twenty or thirty dozen have sometimes 
been taken in a single tide. These are sold to the Roman 
Catholics, who eat them on those days on which they are for- 
bidden by their religion the use of animal food, fish excepted ; 
these birds, and a few others of the same fishy flavour, having 
been exempted from the interdict, on the supposition of their 
being cold-blooded, and partaking of the nature of fish.* 
• The scoter abounds in Lapland, Norway, Sweden, Russia, 
and Siberia. It was also found by Osbeck, between the islands 
of Java and St Paul, lat. 30 -and 34, in the month of June.f 
This species is twenty-one inches in length, and thirty-four 
in extent, and is easily distinguished from all other ducks by 
the peculiar form of its bill, which has at the base a large ele- 
vated knob, of a red colour, divided by a narrow line of yel- 
low, which spreads over the middle of the upper mandible, 
reaching nearly to its extremity, the edges and lower mandible 
are black ; the eyelid is yellow ; irides, dark hazel ; the whole 
plumage is black, inclining to purple on the head and neck ; 
legs and feet, reddish. 
The female has little or nothing of the knob on the bill ; 
her plumage, above, a sooty brown, and below of a greyish 
white. 
* Bewick. 
*}■ Voyage, i. p. 120. 
