Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/314

diver, etc., as well as goosander. . . . . My bird is twenty-five and seven eighths inches long and thirty-five in alar extent. From point of wing to end of primaries, eleven inches. It is a great diver, and does not mind the cold. It appears admirably adapted for diving and swimming. Its body is flat, and its tail short, flat, compact and wedge-shaped. Its eyes peer out from a slight slit or semicircle in the skin of the head, and its legs are flat and thin in one direction, and the toes shut up compactly so as to create the least friction when drawing them forward, but their broad webs spread three inches and a half when they take a stroke. The web is extended three eighths of an inch beyond the inner toe of each foot. There are very conspicuous black teeth, like serrations, along the edges of its bill, and this also is roughened so that it may hold its prey securely. The breast appeared quite dry when I raised it from the water. The head and neck are, as Wilson says, black, glossed with green, but the lower part of the neck pure white, and these colors bound on each other so abruptly that one appears to be sewed on to the other. It is a perfect wedge from the middle of its body to the end of its tail, is only three and one fourth inches deep from back to breast at the thickest part, while the greatest breadth horizontally