Crossword-Solution: SCOTER 6 letters, 14 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 8

With the common blackbird, capercailzie, blackcock, black scoter-duck (Oidemia), and even with one of the birds of paradise (Lophorina atra), the males alone are black, whilst the females are brown or mottled; and there can hardly be a doubt that blackness in these cases has been a sexually selected character.

With several birds, in which the male alone is black, and in others in which both sexes are black, the beak or skin about the head is brightly coloured, and the contrast thus afforded adds much to their beauty; we see this in the bright yellow beak of the male blackbird, in the crimson skin over the eyes of the blackcock and capercailzie, in the brightly and variously coloured beak of the scoter-drake (Oidemia), in the red beak of the chough (Corvus graculus, Linn.), of the black swan, and the black stork.

Far out to sea a black line, which might have been a sea-serpent if it hadn't been scoter ducks, trailed undulating over the waves, and a single great white gannet plunged from aloft into the deep at intervals with a report like a sunset gun.

She showed black dots bobbing upon silver lanes, which were sea-duck of various kinds--scaup, long tail, scoter, and the rest.

And there is the well-known `pintail,' and the `pochard' or `red-head;' and the `mallard,' from which comes the common domestic variety, and the `scoter,' and `surf,' and `velvet,' and `dusky,' ducks--these last four being all, more or less, of a dark colour.