Part 7 — AMERICAN TEAL. (Anas Crecca. Wilson.)

The Green-Winged, or American Teal, (Anas Crecca, Wilson,) has received the name of American Teal from the naturalists of Europe, as being a distinct species from their own, an error exposed in a satisfactory manner by Wilson. Like the Summer Duck, it prefers fresh water, and frequents ponds, marshes, and the reedy shores of creeks and rivers. It is very abundant among the rice plantations of the Southern States; and its flesh is accounted excellent food. It is said to breed in Hudson’s Bay, and to have from five to seven young at a time. It is known, according to Latham and Bewick, to build in France and England, but, so far as we know, it does not breed in the United States. The Common Teal is so highly esteemed in England as to bring five shillings a pound in the London market. We believe that as our sportsmen become in a greater degree scientific naturalists, an advance which cannot be much longer delayed in this progressive age, the highly interesting class of the Anatidæ will become accurately known, the concealment with which it has hitherto been suffered to cloak its habits and its history, will be torn away, and the artifices of the naturalists exposed, who are far too prone, when unable to point out the proper locality of any duck, at any season, to “send it to Siberia,” and put it into sort of Arctic parchment. Thus with many of the ducks, but of those that have been said to rear their broods in the inhospitable climes of the north, very many have never been seen there; and we are greatly inclined to believe that many described as winter visitants are resident birds, passing the summer dispersedly, and in places where they have but little chance of being seen. After the pairing time, the males are peculiarly retired and silent; and the close sitting females do not come abroad until they are able to launch their young ducklings upon that element of which they are in future to be so much the ornament.