COURTSHIP OF THE GREAT CRESTED GREBE. 499 
which are recorded on p. 549. A pair of birds had been preening 
themselves and fishing, with occasional languid bouts of head- 
shaking. After a dive they came up not far apart and swam to- 
gether with outstretched necks, which, as they neared each other, 
they gradually raised, beginning to shake their heads a little at 
the same time. The raising and the shaking progressed simul- 
taneously, till when the birds were face to face they were in the 
regular ‘“‘shaking” attitude and waggling their heads with a 
vengeance. The bout of shaking thus begun was the longest I ever 
saw : between them the birds shook their heads no less than 84 
times, and with as much vigour at the eighty-fourth as at the first 
shake. There was rather a curious difference between the cock 
and the hen. At first neither of the birds did any of the wing- 
lifting, the strange parody of preening described above, and 
there named habit-preening. After the fifteenth shake, the hen 
began to give an occasional wing-lift, and these became more and 
more frequent on her part, until after about the sixtieth shake 
she was turning round and putting her beak under her wing- 
feathers between nearly every shake. The cock, on the other hand, 
did not begin this habit-preening until after the fortieth shake, 
and even after that only repeated the trick at rare intervals. 
At the close of the bout, the pair swung parallel, but did not 
bring their necks down. Nor did they lower their ruffs; on the 
contrary, they put them up still further, from the pear-shaped 
form customary for shaking to the extreme elliptical, bringing 
down their ears meanwhile from the vertical to the lateral posi- 
tion, so that the whole crest now appeared like a large chestnut- 
and-black Elizabethan ruff. This change in the crests made me 
think something exciting was going to happen. Sure enough, 
the hen soon dived. The cock waited in the same attitude, 
motionless, for perhaps a quarter of a minute. Then he, too, 
dived. Another quarter of a minute passed. Then the hen 
appeared again, and a second or two later, some twenty-five yards 
away, the cock came up as well. 
They were in a crouching position, with necks bent forward, 
ruffs still elliptical, and both were holding in their beaks a bunch 
of dark ribbony weed, which they must have pulled from the 
bottom. The hen looked about her eagerly when she first came 
up: when the cock appeared she put her head down still further 
and swam straight towards him at a good pace. He caught sight 
of her almost immediately too, and likewise lowering his head, 
made off to meet her. They did not slacken speed at all, and I 
wondered what would happen when they met. My wonder was 
justified : when about a yard apart they both sprang up from the 
water into an almost erect position, looking somewhat like the 
‘“‘shostly Penguin” already described. Sprang is perhaps too 
strong a word; there was no actual leap, but a very quick 
rising-up of the birds. The whole process, however, was much 
quicker and more vigorous than the slow “ growing out of the 
water ” of the ghost-dive. In addition, the head was here not 
