HABITS OF THE GREAT CRESTED GREBE. 349 



recorded of a unique nature. Other birds act, sometimes, in 

 more or less the same way. I have seen a pair of Shags at the 

 nest (but not whilst occupied in building it) hold between them 

 a piece of seaweed, and move their heads about with it in a 

 strange half-coquettish manner, as though they knew what they 

 meant. I have seen Gulls and the Great Skua pick a blade or 

 two of grass, and then run with it to the partner bird, appa- 

 rently only to show it, for it was dropped and not used in 

 building the nest, which was not just in that place. Each time 

 there was a peculiar kind of consciousness in the manner and 

 look of either bird, impossible not to notice and equally so 

 to describe. I have also seen one of two rival Wheatears, in 

 the midst of violently excited movements, catch up a piece of 

 grass or stick, and run and lay it in a depression of the ground 

 out of which it had just started. In most of these cases, as it has 

 appeared to me, the object thus seized hold of is in the nature 

 of a symbol. That anything used in the construction of the 

 nest should — during the nuptial season — fill the bird's mind 

 with a picture of its construction, and with all the ideas and 

 associations connected with this, we can understand ; and, as 

 male birds fight together, at this time, for the possession of the 

 female, it does not seem impossible that a vision of what such 

 possession implies should sometimes pass through the mind 

 of either combatant, when not in the actual frenzy of combat. 

 In the case of the Wheatear, however, there may be another 

 way of explaining this action, to which I will recur. In the 

 other instances its symbolic nature seems more apparent. 

 Especially is this the case with these two Grebes. They seized 

 hold of and moved about with the weed, very much as a man 

 might seize and wave a banner, and a certain set of pleasur- 

 able ideas and emotions — to do with nest-building, courtship, 

 dalliance on the nest — became, as it were, focussed by their 

 doing so. Held by both, it was a symbol of what both felt, 

 and of all that related to their mutual affection. I do not, of 

 course, mean to suggest that the birds were conscious of the 

 symbolical meaning of what they did in the way in which a 

 man would be, but if their action was not in its essential 

 nature symbolical, then will anyone explain its precise signifi- 

 cance, and why it was so immediately followed by an eager 



