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 CHAPTER XI

DARWINIAN EIDER-DUCKS

HAVE seen a fair number of eider-ducks within the last few days. All the grown ones are females—not a male to be seen now—and the greater number of them are unaccompanied by ducklings. Of those that are, most have but one, and three is the maximum number that I have seen swimming together with their mother. Yet two years ago, in early June, the males here were courting the females, and when I left, about the middle of the month, but very few eggs, I believe, had been laid. This year, I learn, the birds have been very late in breeding, there having been some very "rough weather," as it is euphoniously called, in the spring—that is to say, the spring has been like a bad winter, and now the summer, though it has no very close resemblance to any of the four seasons as I have seen them elsewhere, yet comes nearest to a phenomenally bad November. I wonder, therefore, that so many of these mother eiders are without their young ones, for they should all have hatched out a brood of them not so very long ago. Why, too, should so many be swimming with one duckling only? Were these single ones of any size, one could understand the others of the brood having escaped from tutelage, but, like all I have seen, they are but little fluffy things. It looks as though their 74