Bird Watching

by Edmund Selous

Habet! Great-Crested Grebe Attacked by Another Under Water.

Razorbills also dive briskly, opening the wings and with a kick up, as it were, of the legs and tail. If one sits on a height and they come sufficiently near inshore to look down on them at an acute angle, one can follow their course under the water, often for a considerable time. One remarks then that the wings are moved both together—flapped or beaten—so that the bird really flies through the water. In flight, however, they are spread straight out without a bend in them, whereas here they are all the while flexed at the joint, being raised from and brought downwards again towards the sides in the same position in which they repose against them when closed. These birds—and, no doubt, the other divers—dive not only to catch fish, but also for the sake of speed. I have seen them when travelling steadily along the shore duck down and swim or fly like this, in a straight line and but just below the surface of the water, always pursuing the same direction, and seeming to have no difficulty in guiding themselves. The speed was very much greater than when they merely paddled on the surface. Thus we may see, perhaps, how such birds as the great auk and the penguins came to lose the power of flight. They could fly in two ways, either through the air or the water. The first—as long as they retained it at all, probably—was much the quicker; but the other was quick enough for their purposes, and the effort required to rise from the water was thus dispensed with. These razorbills dived in order to get more quickly to some point for which they were making. They might have got there still sooner by flying, but the time saved was evidently not worth that effort to them. But the power of flight might be long retained by a bird—though useless to it in other respects—owing to its habit of laying its eggs on otherwise inaccessible ledges of the rock.

When three or four razorbills are swimming together, it is common for one of them to dive first, and for the rest to follow in quick succession, sometimes so quick that the order in which they go down, and the succession itself, can only just be followed. They must keep together under the water as well as above it, since they will often emerge so, after some time, and at a considerable distance.

The guillemot dives more or less like the razorbill, but I have not been successful in tracing him under the water.

There remains the puffin. "I have been able to follow the puffin downwards in its dive, and at once noticed that the legs, instead of being used, were trailed behind, as in flight, so that the bird's motion was a genuine flight through water, unassisted by the webbed feet. With the razorbill, I was not able to make this out so clearly, for the legs are black, and the eye cannot detect them under the water, as it can the bright vermilion ones of the puffin (one wonders, by the way, if the latter play any part under water such as the white tail of the rabbit is supposed to do on land), though I could see that just in diving they were brought together and raised, so as to extend backwards in the same way. Penguins also trail the legs like this in diving, only giving an occasional paddle with them, whilst the wings are in constant motion."

It would seem, therefore, that those diving birds which swim with their wings under the water only use their feet in a minor degree, and that they go down with a quick, sudden duck, or bob, and in the act of opening their wings. On the other hand, cormorants, shags, and mergansers, birds which do not use their wings in this way, dive in a quite different manner. Instead of the sudden, little, splashy duck, as described, they make a smooth, gliding leap forwards and upwards, rising a little from the water, with the neck stretched out, and wings pressed close to the sides, to enter it again, beak foremost, like a curved arrow, thus describing the segment of a circle. Their shape, as they perform this movement, is that of a bent bow, and there is the same suggestion in it of pent strength and elasticity.

The shag is the greatest exponent of this school of diving, excelling even the cormorant—at least I fancy so—by virtue of his smaller size. He leaps entirely clear of the water, including even, for a moment, his legs and feet. This seems really a surprising feat, for, as I say, the wings are tightly closed, so that, by the force merely of the powerful webbed feet, he is able to throw himself bodily out of the sea. It must be by a single stroke, I think, for the motion is sudden and then continuous. The bird may, of course, have been in ordinary activity just previously, so that some slight degree of impetus may be supposed to have been already gained, but this is unnecessary, and the leap is often from quiescence. The merganser dives like the shag or cormorant—though the curved leap is a little less vigorous—and swims, like them, without using the wings. His food being fish, instead of getting deeper and deeper down till he disappears, like the eider-duck, he usually swims horizontally, sometimes only just beneath the surface, and, as he comes right into the shallow inlets, where the water almost laps the shore, he can often be watched thus gliding in rapid pursuit. Though I saw all his turns and efforts, I never could see either the fish or the capture of it—supposing that this took place. If it did, the fish must each time have been swallowed, or at least pouched, beneath the surface, as the bird never emerged with one in his bill. There are, of course, several different species of merganser and goosander. I cannot be quite sure of the identity of the bird which has given rise to these observations—I think it was the red-throated merganser—but, no doubt, the ways and habits of all the species are either identical or nearly so.

It is interesting to find the little dabchick of our ponds and streams diving sometimes in the manner of the shag and cormorant, though, of course, tempered with his own little soft individuality. I have this note of him, taken in the frost and snow of a cold December day whilst he sported in his little creek just a few feet in front of me. "He gives a little leap up in the water, making a graceful curve, a pretty little curl, as he plunges. One sees the curve of his back—which is something—as he spring-glides down. The action is that of the cormorant, but, rendered by himself, made dabchicky. Of course he is in the water all the time; he does not shoot right out of it. There is far less power and energy. It is a star-twinkle to a lightning-flash, a floss ringlet to a bended bow." And again: "He is diving now very prettily, with a graceful little curled arch in the air before going down."

I say that the dabchick sometimes dives like this, for he has many ways of doing so, and it is not very often that he will repeat the same thing twice in succession. Sometimes he dips so smoothly and still-ly down that one seems hardly to miss him from where he was; there is just a swirl on the stream—which seems, now, to represent him—and that all but silent sound, so cool and pleasant, as of water sucked down into water. Or, swimming smoothly down the current, he stops suddenly, brings the neck stiffly and straightly forward, with eye fixed intently, severely on the water—piercing down into it as though making a point—and then down he goes with a click, almost a snap, flirting the water-drops up into the air with his tiny little mite of a tail. I have seen it stated, I think, that the dabchick has no tail, or that he has no tail to speak of. I shall speak of it, for I have seen it enter largely into his deportment. When, as I say, he dives like this, suddenly, it may be flirted up with such vigour that, mite as it is, it will send a little shower of sparkling drops to 20 feet away or more. It may be said that it is not so much the tail as the whole body that does this. I say that the tail has its share, and a good share, too—more, perhaps, than is quite fair. At any rate, I have seen the prettiest little drop of all whisked right off the tip of it, and the sun shining more upon that one than any of the others—and that, I think, is having a tail to speak of. But when swimming along quite quietly, the dabchick's tail, instead of being cocked or flirted up like the moor-hen's, is drawn smoothly down on the water so as not to project and thus interfere with its owner's appearance, which is that of a little, smooth, brown, oiled powder-puff, "smooth as oil, soft as young down." The dabchick, therefore, has a tail, and knows how to regulate it.

Between these two extremes of the dabchick's manner of diving, and independently of the little curled leap à la cormorant, there are infinite gradations, as well as all sorts of mannerisms and individualities. But in all these I do not distinctly remember to have seen him throw out his wings in the act of going down.