io 4 IN BERKSHIRE FIELDS 



lows, looking for these nests, which sometimes were 

 hardly more than rafts of sticks floating on the 

 water, and lightly anchored to a cat-stalk or two. 

 But the chief sport was to shoot at them from shore 

 with an old muzzle-loading shotgun, not so much to 

 kill them, for I cannot recall ever being sure that I 

 even hit one, but to see them dive. It was popu- 

 larly supposed that between seeing the flash of the 

 gun and the arrival of the shot the hell-diver could 

 completely submerge, and great was the quantity 

 of explosives we used up in experiments. My pres- 

 ent recollection is that when we saw the little 

 splashes indicating that the shct had hit the water 

 the bird was invariably out of sight. If we had pos- 

 sessed modern high-power rifles, perhaps the results 

 might have been different, had our aim been equal 

 to the occasion. At any rate, the pied-billed grebe — 

 which, by the way, is a comparatively small bird, 

 only twelve to fourteen inches long, or about half the 

 length of an American merganser — is a marvelously 

 expert diver, either going down with one tilt and 

 kick when startled or submerging slowly, like a sub- 

 marine, by expelling air from its lungs and air-sacs. 

 It can, and does, rise for air simply by elevating its 

 bill above water, beside some reed or amid the lily- 

 pads, so that the eye of a mere man cannot detect 

 it. Here, no doubt, is the explanation of all the 

 mysterious "kills" we made as boys, with the old 

 shotgun, and of the fact that even after the tradi- 

 tional three days we never found any bodies floating 

 on the pond — only a fresh flotilla of birds swimming 

 prettily about outside the rim of lily-pads. So 

 many of our ponds and marshes have now been 



