THE GREAT CRESTED GREBE * Sl 



ram ilyPODlCIPEDID^E. 







GREAT CRESTED GREBE. 



Podicipes cristalus, (LiNN). 



THE Great Crested Grebe is a local and partial resident, breeding on the 

 broads, meres, lakes and other large sheets of water in various parts of the 

 country. Formerly this bird was in considerable danger of being exterminated 

 by collectors who were in the habit of supplying Grebe skins to the dealers in 

 plumes, " Grebe " being at one time very fashionable for ladies muffs and trimm- 

 ings. Indeed the naturalists of fifty years ago seem to have contemplated the 

 disappearance of this very ornamental species from our inland waters with a 

 mournful resignation. 



At the present day this species resorts, in the breeding season, to the broads 

 of East Anglia, and the meres and lakes of Yorkshire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, 

 Lancashire and Brecon among other localities ; also the extensive reservoirs of 

 Hertfordshire, and has been known to breed on ornamental water and reservoirs 

 in Rutland and Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire. In its old haunts, 

 the Shropshire meres, I have met with it in May, and it has bred for some years 

 to my knowledge, on various reservoirs in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and North- 

 amptonshire. I have seen as many as a dozen pairs of adult birds on a reservoir 

 of about seventy acres in extent. In Scotland it has been recorded as breeding 

 in the south, and as present in the breeding season on lochs in the east ; while 

 Selby's somewhat vague statement, made sixty years ago, to the effect that this 

 species bred on a few of the northern Scottish lakes, has received supporting 

 evidence from modern investigators (" Zoologist," 1889, p. 352, 386). In Ireland, 

 Mr. R. J. Ussher records that it breeds on lakes, large and small, in Antrim, 

 Down, Armagh, Monaghan, Fermanagh, Cavan, Longford, Westmeath, Louth, 

 King's and Queen's Counties, Clare, Roscommon, Sligo and Leitrim ; also, doubt- 

 fully, in Galway and Tipperary. 



The Great Crested Grebe is "Resident in all parts of the Old World, 

 including New Zealand, except in the Arctic Regions and the Tropics. Summer 

 visitor only where the winters are severe" (Seebohin). It does not occur in 

 Iceland or Greenland ; is only an uncertain breeder in any part of Norway ; but 



