The sheld is the largest and handsomest of British ducks. It invariably breeds in a burrow on a plateau commanding the sea, and when approaching its nest plumps right down at the mouth of the hole. Its creamy eggs are large and round; and for a day or so after the young are hatched they are kept underground. Emerging from their retreat, they are immediately led or carried down to the tide. The young seem to be able to smell salt water, and will cover miles to gain it. An interesting fact anent another of our British ducks centres about the golden-eye, an exquisite study in black and white, the back of the neck and head being burnished with violet and green. A trait which the golden-eye has is its almost invariable habit of nesting in holes in trees--remarkable in the case of a duck--so that the Laps place darkened boxes by the sides of rivers and lakes for the ducks to lay in. Often as many as a dozen eggs are found, and the nests are lined with the soft down of the birds. The golden-eye has been seen to transport its young to the water from a considerable altitude. While botanising by the side of a lake, where these beautiful birds breed in great numbers, a Lap clergyman observed one of them drop into the water, and at the same time an infant duck appeared. After watching awhile and seeing the old bird fly to and from the nest several times, he made out that the young bird was held under the bill, but supported by the neck of the parent. All the British woodpeckers bear out the theory already stated. They lay glossy white eggs, and their nests, (if the touchwood upon which their eggs are deposited can be so called,) are always built in holes in growing wood or decayed timber. The stock-dove, one of our pretty wild pigeons, nests in colonies in rabbit-burrows, as does the brown owl. When ferreting for rabbits the writer has put both these birds out of the holes instead of their rightful owners. The nuthatch is yet another bird which upholds the same rule, and whose case is peculiarly interesting. It not only lays purely white eggs in holes in trees, but if the hole for ingress and egress is one whit too large it is plastered up by the industrious bird until it barely admits the body of the clever little architect.