100 cooT. 
and is generally placed among and loosely attached to flags 
and reeds; sometimes on a tuft of rushes, and composed of 
the former plants: the finer portions are placed inwards. Mr. 
Hewitson says that they are sometimes accumulated so much 
as to rise from half a foot to a foot above the water, going 
down also to a depth of from one foot and a half to two 
feet; the width is about a foot and a half, and the interior 
nearly flat, just sufficiently hollowed to retain the eggs. 
Bewick mentions an instance where the nest of a Coot, 
built among some rushes in a lake at Belsay, the seat of 
Sir W. Middleton, in Northumberland, having been dislodged 
by the wind and driven about, the hen bird still continued 
to sit on the eggs, and hatched the young as if nothing had 
happened. Such instances occasionally occur, the nest being 
either built on a floating mass of sedge or rushes, or com- 
posed itself of moveable materials. 
Since writing the above, I have observed one placed on 
the water, as indeed they not unfrequently are, and confined 
only in its place by the reeds springing up around it. It 
was only three or four yards from the edge of a small pond, 
adjoining the high-road between High Catton and Stamford 
Bridge. ‘The old bird moved a little way from it as I 
stopped, but did not appear shy, as she doubtless would at 
another time. 
Bishop Stanley writes thus on the subject of this part of 
the natural history of these birds:—‘“They, too, build a simple 
rushy nest, but with this difference, that instead of seeking 
to raise it above the water, they seem to prefer it floating 
upon the very surface, where, of course, it is exposed to the 
double danger of being carried hither and thither according 
as the wind blows; or if interwoven with reeds or rushes 
close to the water, of being covered, should the waters be 
raised by floods. But the Coot is probably aware of these 
possibilities, and accordingly guards against them, preventing 
the nests being carried away, by ingeniously fastening the 
materials of which they are made, to the rushes or osiers 
near them, but at the same time these fastenings are of such 
a nature as to allow of the nests rismg with the water, so 
that no ordinary flood would expose them to the danger of 
immersion. The Coot, like the Water-Hen, covers her nest, 
and, if not so effectually, yet with a most extraordinary 
rapidity. We have repeatedly watched a Coot quietly sitting 
on her nest; if the boat approaches, she rises, and immedi- 
