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DIVERS, GREBES, AND CORMORANTS. | 161 
places. The nest is always made upon the ground, 
and seldom very far from the water, to which the 
frightened bird can retire readily. An island 
covered with short herbage is always preferred in 
Scotland, but in some places the bare shingly beach 
is selected. This nest, often of the slightest con- 
struction, is made of stalks of plants, roots, and 
all kinds of drifted vegetable fragments, lined with 
grass. Sometimes no nest whatever is made. 
The two eggs are narrow and elongated, olive- or 
rufous-brown, sparingly spotted and speckled with 
blackish-brown and paler brown. The sitting bird 
is ever on the alert to slip off into the water at 
the first alarm; and sometimes both birds will fly 
round and round in anxiety for the fate of their 
treasured eggs. A movement seawards is soon 
taken when the young are sufficiently matured. 
This Diver has a wide geographical range outside 
our limits, extending across Europe and Asia to 
Japan and North-west America, perhaps as far as 
Hudson Bay. American authorities, however, insist 
upon the specific distinctness of most of the Black- 
throated Divers found in Alaska, and have named 
this form C. pacéficus. 
RED-THROATED DIVER. 
Smallest of the British Divers, the present species, 
the Colymbus septentrionals of Linnzeus and modern 
authorities, is also the best known and the most 
widely distributed. It is also the least showy in 
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