GOLDEN EYES, OR GARROTS—GILPIN. 
392 
with its long neck and head at bottom, a vegetarian, loving suc¬ 
culent winter grasses, and even berries, to feed upon which it 
must land upon the barrens—is the last to arrive. Reluctantly 
he quits his solitary lakes, retreating from the ice to the 
estuaries or tide mouths of the streams, driven from them by 
the frost, he seeks the basin and even the wild Bay. Not being 
an adroit diver like his congeners, mid-winter finds him creep¬ 
ing over the slippery rock at ebb-tide, perchance to feed upon 
the soft sea weeds, oftener to pick off the small mollusks adher¬ 
ing in such quantities upon our sea rocks. At flood tide, waiting 
for the ebb to bare his hunting ground, we even find him 
burrowing in the snow for warmth. The crop, a few months ago 
swelled with blue-berries, is now filled with shell fish. The 
luxurious floater and dreamer in the summer lakes, bivouacs 
with the furred hare and feathered grouse in the snow. His 
strong, non-migratory instincts do thus alter his food and habits 
to a degree that is almost incredible save to an eye witness; one 
would suppose too he should be made the peculiar study by those 
who support the views of natural selection origin of species, as 
in the contest of life, few birds are exposed to such repeated and 
violent changes of habit and food. The practical naturalist, 
however, finds no difference, saving a more robust form in those 
who pluck frozen mollusks from snow-covered rocks, and the 
busy fruit eaters in the soft September sun, on the blue-berry 
barren.* 
From this pack of migratory sea birds meeting here on mutual 
ground, those from the cold north finding in the shallow sun 
warmed waters of the basin a genial retreat, others equally 
adapted to fresh or salt, finding comfortable quarters, and others 
again pure fresh water fowls- a chilly tarrying-place, I have se¬ 
lected, a very restricted sub-genus of three species for this paper. 
These three species, the two species of Golden eyes or Garrots, 
*0n submitting two hundred and twenty-seven specimens of Mollusks taken from the crops 
of Blue Wings, Garrots and Scaups, shot during the winter 1876, Digby, N. S., to my friend, 
J. Matthew Jones, he gave me the following list: 
Littorina palliata, Gd. 221 adult & young. 
L. tenebrosa, Gd. 2 young. 
Purpura capillus, Linn. 3 3 ^oung. 
Lucuna vincta, Gd. 1 
