BRITAINS BIRDS AND THEIR NESTS. 13 



ORDER, PYGOPODES (DIVERS AND GREBES); 

 Family, COLYMBID^ (Divers). 



THE RED^THROATED DIVER 



(Colymbus septentrionalis). 

 Plate 5. 



Within a circle of frowning hills — silent, desolate, but 

 majestic in their eternal grandeur — lies an islet-strewn 

 lochan. A few miles to the westward the Atlantic 

 breakers thvmder against the battered skerries, or spend 

 themselves more gradually along the windings of the Qord- 

 like sea-lochs. To the eastward lie the troubled waters 

 of the Minch, with the mainland heights dim purple in 

 the hazy distance. The rocks around are among the oldest 

 masses on the earth's surface ; the hills preserve the 

 rounded outlines modelled by the great ice-sheets, of 

 whose passage the countless scattered boulders are also 

 silent witnesses. Here and there, where the protecting 

 heather and peat have been but recently swept away, the 

 rock surface, polished and scratched, repeats the tale, 

 while more often an older exposure, with its frost-shattered 

 cliffs and torrent-swept gullies, tells of the power of forces 

 still at work. It is a history in which man has played 

 no part, and in which his present share is of the most 

 superficial kind. The scene has a more fitting occupant in 

 the Loon, a large bird of truly archaic type, which seems, 

 among the more typical birds of to-day, like an old-time 

 galleon among racing craft of modem design — a primitive 

 form still surviving in an age of specialisation. 



On our Hebridean lochan the Loon that we have to 



