178 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
fish. She flies straight to her chick in the bay, and, laying it 
on the water, the latter takes it whilst it is yet leaving her bill, 
and pouches it with ease and celerity. It is a matter of a 
moment, and no undue disparity in size between chick and fish 
now appears. The chicks are bigger than they look. They are 
still all covered, as far as I can see, with a light brownish woolly 
down. This gives an idea of smallness, and they do look very 
small beside the parents, but the latter are big birds. Still, with 
all this, the fish just brought was a tremendous rations—some- 
thing like a whole tongue, a good many times enlarged, for us. 
A little while before this the other chick came out on the 
water, but almost immediately retired again. He keeps rigor- 
ously at the upper end of the loch, in a sort of little basin which 
it forms, all by himself, but not now behind that particular point 
which hitherto he always has gone behind. The same kind of 
change has been to remark with the female bird and her chick, 
for whereas they used to be constantly moored, as one may say, 
in the bend of the loch, on one side, they have now, since a day 
or so, changed this spot for the bay opposite. 
Just before this entry I saw a Red-throated Diver (not one of 
my pair) make a very fine descent from a height on to a loch 
only just behind the first rise here. The wings were held raised 
above the back, pointing backwards, with a sharp bend at the 
jointure, and thus, without a single beat, the bird stooped most 
eracefully, and with some fine sweeps—in a leisurely way— 
on to the water, almost sheer below it. Thus on these narrow 
wings, in spite of the disproportionate size of the body, such a 
bird as this can stoop as though it were an Hagle or Heron. 
Male in with a fish, and there is now an interesting scene. 
He comes down in the little loop or pool at the further end of 
the loch, but does not see the chick, who has changed his place, | 
and does not see him either. He waits off the point, a little, 
then off the opposite shore, and then begins to dive down the 
loch in search of the chick, scanning all about, each time, when 
he comes up. In this way he progresses to a little off the 
entrance to the bay, within which are the mother and chick, so 
that the whole of it must be visible to him. He then, instead of 
entering it, turns and dives up the loch again, and going further 
within the projection last spoken of—on the opposite side to the 
one round which the chick usually is—I see him, all at once, 
