84 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
gliding splash upon the water, and, looking up, I was just in 
time to see the bird that had been absent settling upon it. He 
had now an unmistakable fish in his bill, and, as though to 
confirm this, a Lesser Black-backed Gull stooped twice or thrice 
towards it, as if with the idea of seizing it from the Diver’s beak. 
The latter, who did not seem at all intimidated by this action, 
now swam towards the partner bird and chicks, diving more 
than once on his way to them. As he came up, the last time, 
the chicks swam to him, and he put down the fish on the water, 
before them, just as he had done on the 13th with the supposed 
weed, which I now think must have been a fish too. Presumably 
one of the chicks ate the fish, and a choice as to which should 
have it may have been exercised by the parent bird, but all this — 
—as also on the last occasion—I was unable to see. In regard 
to the fish, it did not look to me like a trout, but of a longer and 
straighter shape, more like a sand-eel. This, taken in connection 
with the bird having flown down on to the loch with it, and its 
previous considerable absence, seems to suggest that the young 
are fed with fish from the sea, and not from one or other of the 
fresh-water lochs, amidst which these Divers breed. Some of 
these, indeed, are so small that one can hardly suppose them to 
contain fish, and it was on one of the smallest that I watched a 
pair, with young, on the 14th. Others, however, are larger and 
well stocked with trout, and of these there are two, in close 
proximity to the one which this pair has appropriated. 
After the above incident the birds swam quietly about the 
little loch, sometimes all together, but more often the two parents 
would be separated by alittle, and then sometimes each would be 
accompanied bya chick. But this was never for long. Very soon 
both would be paddling near one of them, and this was always 
the case when there was any wide interval between the two. 
At 8.380 one of the parents, thus accompanied, swam to the 
far end of the loch, where, just round a little grassy point, the 
old bird took the shore. Of this, at least, I felt sure, since I 
could see its head above the grassy projection, higher than it 
would have risen from the water, and always in exactly the same 
place, up to 6.0 p.m., when I left; and I might also assume, 
from what I had seen before, that the chicks were resting, one 
under each wing—perhaps asleep. 
