110 Correspondence. Jan. 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
Habits of the Great Crested Grebe. 
Epitor or ‘THE AUK’ 
Dear Sir:— 
In this year’s (1916) April number of ‘The Auk,’ Mr. Julian Huxley, 
in his interesting paper ‘Bird Watching and Biological Science,’ says, 
speaking of the Great Crested Grebe:— ‘‘There (that is to say in inland 
waters) in February, pairing-up takes place, a process not yet wholly 
disentangled, but certainly associated with a great deal of flying and 
chasing” (p. 150). Insofar, however, as I have been able to observe, this 
supposed pairing-up process does not take place at all, so that there is 
nothing to disentangle in relation to it, nor do any difficulties, specially 
appertaining to the behavior of the birds at this time, present themselves. 
Mr. Huxley was kind enough, before he left England, to send me his notes 
upon this species, and he suggested that I should investigate what took 
place immediately after the arrival of the birds in han since he him- 
self was precluded from doing so. 
Accordingly, on the 15th of February, 1915, I went down to the Fring 
Reservoirs, and was told, by the keeper at whose cottage I stayed, that 
only two birds had yet been seen anywhere. Next day, however, the head 
keeper sent word that six had come down (I think the evening before, 7. e. 
the 15th) on one of the two larger sheets of water. It was the opinion of 
the keepers that my own arrival and that of the birds synchronised closely. 
From now onwards, I watched the birds, up to March the 7th, by which 
time most, if not all of them, had at least located their nesting sites. As 
a result, I can say that, according to what I saw, these Grebes (I am not 
considering young and previously unmated birds, of which there was no 
indication) arrive paired, that they enter, either at once or very shortly, 
upon their conjugal display actions, and that the flying and chasing is 
neither a very pronounced feature, nor has it the import which has been 
attributed to it by (if I mistake not) the head keeper of the Tring Reser- 
voirs; that is to say, it has not essentially to do with the assumed pairing- 
up of the actually already paired birds. The above is the gist of the notes 
which I took, and which still remain in their MS. state. Otherwise I 
should have sent them to Mr. Huxley, and had, indeed, intended to do 
so, in any shape or form, but one thing gets in the way of another, and 
tardiness increases with age. 
It would seem therefore that, as I had suspected (and suspect in many 
more instances than where this is supposed to be the case) the Great 
Crested Grebe pairs for life, which fact, if established, would be in harmony 
with my view that excitatory sexual movements either first arose under, 
