Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/199

Rh continued to work thus alone for a short time afterwards; yet the nest, when I first saw it at 6.10, looked as large as the other, and as though it represented a great deal more weed than the birds had brought in these fifty minutes. They must, I think, have been working from earliest dawn. The male did not, this time, leave off nest-building to continuously build a platform, but on three or four occasions he varied the former by taking a cargo to a patch of very green and grassy-looking rushes, just off the bank, returning, then, to the nest and continuing to work as before. On the last of these journeys he brought a stick to the bank, and, having laid it down, he immediately stood up—I have no doubt upon it, as part of the platform. I had seen him standing there before, also, as well as sitting, shortly after I arrived. The male Crested Grebe therefore, at any rate, makes a platform of weeds, &c., at a little distance from the nest, on which to stand or sit during the building of it, and also probably during incubation. Both to-day and yesterday the female sometimes carried a very large mass of weed to the nest. Once yesterday her head and neck, as she dragged it, were pulled right back, and this morning her head was once almost hidden behind the mass she was holding. The male never carried quite so large a quantity, though his average was about the same, and he worked very quickly and eagerly. Generally he carried a longer and thinner piece, which would rest on his back and stream behind him along the water. To see him swimming thus draped, very quickly and straight as a die, to the nest was a pretty—indeed, a fascinating—sight. He would swim out from the nest, dive and emerge generally, if not always, with his head turned the other way—to it, that is—and swim back almost without a pause. He swam much faster than the female.

7.30.—I now notice the male bird making his platform or raft systematically, bringing cargo after cargo to it. He takes three or four (how many he may have taken before I caught sight of him I do not know), but now, at 7.35, both birds are at the nest again, and the female places a stick upon it.

7.40.—Male carrying loads to his platform again. He has carried, I think, two or three more, and now stands up, and then sits upon it in the same way as does the female on the nest.

7.43.—He is off again, and carries another load a little past