turned to look at them. Later, when I was a few miles farther down the coast, at Redondo Beach, two Pelicans flew in, lighting wide apart on the water, where they sat with bills folded on their necks, rocking like small boats at sea. Their arrival created great excitement among the Gulls, who gathered around them screaming, and even lighting down close besiege them trying to get their fish away from them. At Venice the next day four more Pelicans passed down the shore, flying low over the water in a close row, bills down in front of them ready for action. All four would flap a few strokes, then all four would soar with wings outspread, then gradually all would take to flapping again, then change to soaring, like rowers in a boat.
From the strip of land between the shore and the marsh, one day a strange nasal honk high overhead made me look up. A solitary figure, a pure white bird with black wing tips was flying swiftly across the sky. A Snow Goose! The first I had ever seen. I shall never forget the thrill of that moment.
The Ducks that came to the marshes were seen only at a distance. "There's a Duck!" a woman exclaimed one day pointing to a Cormorant, smilingly, glad to show me what I wanted. But a puff of smoke out over the ocean did turn into a line of Ducks. "They go out over the ocean and stay when the hunters are shooting on the marshes", my bird-wise friend informed me, "coming back when the marshes are quiet". However that may be, when it was raining a flock flew in low over the water.
The only Ducks seen near at hand were three handsome Scaups keeping at a safe distance back of the surf, and great sea-ducks—Scoters of various species. While I was resting on a short stretch of shore without birds one noon, enjoying the lazy swash of the waves, suddenly out on the water between seas three dark Ducks appeared and disappeared before I could focus my glass on them. On reappearing they proved to be young Surf Scoters with white spots at the base of the bill and back of the ear. They rode the waves prettily, sometimes preening themselves as if at home, sometimes rising and shaking themselves, showing the light on the middle of the belly; or, with bills over their backs apparently napped, "rocked in the cradle of the deep" in very truth. They might have been black corks bobbing on the water for all they seemed to care what the waves did to them. But after a short nap they dived, leaving me to enjoy the sparkling surface of the water, the level lines of buffy cloud over the Santa Monica Mountains, a shifting wedge of Ducks that flew across to the lagoon in the marshes, and a flock of slender white Terns that passed spirit-like through the sky.
One day two female White-winged Scoters flew into the rollers near shore with five others that must have been American Scoters (Oidemia americana) as they showed no white markings on their black plumage. But most of the great black sea birds seen were Surf Scoters. After watching young for a week I was excited by the appearance of two of the strikingly marked adult males, with swollen bright orange bill, a snow-white patch above it, and an oblong white patch at the back of the neck, the bulging of the swollen nostrils at a distance suggesting the high straight bill of the Canvasback. The family are well marked. The neck patch of the male makes a striking field character, as do the two white spots at the side of the head in the young; while the female, lacking the ear patch, can be told by elimination.
A handsome male which flew in one day was joined by five young ones,
