NOTES 69 



Glaucous Gulls and Little Auks off the East Coast of 

 Ross-shire. — On nth December 1914 a gale commenced from 

 the south-east and continued till the 14th. On the morning of the 

 13th I noticed several Black-backed Gulls fighting for something 

 on the shore, and on going down I found it was a little bird. I 

 then observed numbers of Little Auks on the sea. The following 

 morning I saw thousands of Little Auks flying east, and a great 

 many on the sea and close along the shore. The Great Black- 

 back, the Glaucous, and the Herring Gulls were busy catching them. 

 Whenever the Little Auks came to the surface the Gulls would make 

 a dive at them. The Glaucous seemed to be the cleverest, and I 

 noticed one get three in a short time. They devoured them as 

 soon as they caught them, and they continued catching them up to 

 dark. On the 15th I only saw a few Little Auks, the gale having 

 ceased and the wind changed to the north ; I observed a good few 

 Glaucous Gulls, but on the i6th I only saw two, and the Little Auks 

 were all away. — T. Allan, Tarbatness Lighthouse. 



Some Observations on the Nesting Habits of the 

 Slavonian Grebe. — We once had the pleasure of visiting a Scottish 

 nesting-place of the Slavonian Grebe {Colytnhis auritus), and think 

 that perhaps a few notes on the habits of the species at its breeding- 

 place may prove of interest to others less fortunate than ourselves. 

 When we reached the wind-swept loch where these birds breed, we 

 found them a great deal tamer than we expected, and got many 

 excellent views of them going to and coming off the nest and in the 

 open. The males were a good deal brighter than the females, 

 the plumage being more vivid and the red iris very conspicuous in 

 the former but less so in the latter. They had a most curious note, 

 a kind of chattering trill, quite indescribable ; when we first heard 

 it we thought it was the distant noise of a gullery, but soon dis- 

 covered that it was uttered by the Grebes. They were very 

 vociferous ; once, when a male and female were approaching each 

 other, they swam up close together, lowered their heads till they 

 were almost lying along the water, touched their bills tip to tip, and 

 one gave vent to this interesting and curious trill. They were very 

 pugnacious, driving off any duck which happened to alight near them. 

 We found two nests, both built in beds of Eqiiisetmn growing in the 

 water. One nest we examined very closely ; it was moored round 

 four tufts of EqiiisetH7n and was awash, the platform on which the 

 eggs were laid being extremely sodden. It was built of dead reeds 

 and Equisctum^ and contained four uncovered eggs, one, doubtless 

 the last laid, being very much cleaner than the rest. The other 



