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Some of these not only swim but dive in the salt waters, and to this class of divers belong the grebe, loon, murre, and puffin. They dive at the flash of a gun, and after what seems a long time, come up far away from the spot the hunter aimed at.
Wallace saw several uxen, through his telescope, walking about upon the inaccessible heights of the Tasmanian Mountains. Darwin acknowledged that the bird exists; Professor Farrago has published a pamphlet containing an accumulation of all data bearing upon the ux. Why should not Madame la Comtesse be heard by the entire congress?" I looked at Sir Peter Grebe.
Entering the long parlour, in which the dance had just been opened by Lady Grebe with a minuet it being now seven o'clock, according to the tradition he was received with a welcome befitting his rank, and looked round for Barbara. She was not dancing, and seemed to be preoccupied almost, indeed, as though she had been waiting for him.
The young birds and adults in winter plumage, when it is the Dusky Grebe of Bewick, are very much like the Eared Grebe in the same state of plumage; but they may always be distinguished, the Sclavonian Grebe always being rather the larger and having the bill straighter, and making a more regular cone than that of the Eared Grebe, which is slightly turned up.
On the same principle it is evident that too exclusive preservation must be injurious to the true interests of the river. Fish enthusiasts, for instance, desire the extinction of water-fowl there is not a single aquatic bird which they do not accuse of damage to fry, spawn, or full-grown fish; no, not one, from the heron down to the tiny grebe.
The golden flowers, grouped in huge heads, are rich in nectar, attracting birds and butterflies by day and flying foxes at night. The fruit, enclosed in a crisp capsule, is tough and leathery, in shape a flattened oval, and is entirely covered with silken seeds lying close and dense as the feathers of the grebe.
One winter day on which the pool was frozen over, except a small opening in one end of it, the grebe dived under the ice and made its way to the far end of the pool, where it remained swimming about aimlessly for some moments. Presently the loon missed its companion, and with an apparent look of concern dived under the ice and joined it at the closed end of the pool.
How strange it is that a bird, under the form of woodpecker, should have been created to prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese, which never or rarely swim, should have been created with webbed feet; that a thrush should have been created to dive and feed on sub-aquatic insects; and that a petrel should have been created with habits and structure fitting it for the life of an auk or grebe! and so on in endless other cases.
I have never seen a Channel Island specimen of the Red-necked Grebe in full breeding-plumage as I have the Sclavonian, but it is a tolerably regular autumn and winter visitant, and in some years appears to be the more numerous of the two.
Petrels are the most aerial and oceanic of birds, but, in the quiet sounds of Tierra del Fuego, the Puffinuria berardi, in its general habits, in its astonishing power of diving, in its manner of swimming and of flying when made to take flight, would be mistaken by any one for an auk or a grebe; nevertheless, it is essentially a petrel, but with many parts of its organisation profoundly modified in relation to its new habits of life; whereas the woodpecker of La Plata has had its structure only slightly modified.
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