130 
NATURE STUDY. 
The most interesting discovery made was a little colony 
of sheldrakes (Merganser americanus) found three times 
in December and once in January, on the unfrozen pools in 
the Merrimack river around Goff’s Falls. It is a well 
known fact that these birds frequent these open parts of the 
river from October until, by freezing over, the mergansers 
are deprived of the greatest item in their menu. Their 
toothed bills and habit of swimming under water make them 
good fishers, and although they live also on berries, pulse, 
worms, frogs, mollusks and crustaceans, it seems as though 
this region could offer them little in the way of these varie¬ 
ties to their regular diet of fish. The flesh of this shel¬ 
drake, at least that of the adult bird, is so fishy in its flavor 
as not to be edible, and hence it escapes the man with the 
gun more easily than its relative, the hooded merganser. 
Flying with these birds was an adult herring gull (Ica¬ 
rus argentatus ■ smithsonianus). The writer had already 
seen him from a car window, circling above the deep pool 
in the Merrimack, opposite Martin’s Ferry, on December 3, 
and here he was again 011 the 20th, a most unexpected, 
though well known, guest. He had, contrary to “all the rules 
of all the schools,’’ been a frequent visitor, from June to Oc¬ 
tober, to the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where the writer 
made a careful note of every time she was so fortunate as 
to see him and his children there. If it was odd to find him 
so far south as Vineyard Sound during the summer, it was 
more so to see him sixty miles inland from Boston harbor, 
looking for fish in a place where man never would go for 
that purpose, and where the great railroad traffic and mighty 
factories would daunt most birds. 
December was so warm and snowless a month, near Man¬ 
chester, that many days were spent by the writer, afield 
with her Femaire. Her reward was six robins, a shrike im¬ 
paling some frozen dainty on a thorn, and the tree sparrows, 
(Spizella monticola). These last were hopping on the 
