Another species of grebe is referred to by Shakespeare in his Venus and Adonis:—
“Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
Who, being look’d on, ducks as quickly in.”
This is the little grebe, or dabchick (Podiceps minor). In some parts of the country we have heard it called “di’ dapper,” but it was not until we had met with the passage above quoted that the meaning of the word became apparent.
On the subject of “loons,” the Rev. H. Jones has some
appropriate remarks in a volume of essays entitled “Holiday Papers” (p. 65). “The great-crested grebe, or loon,” he says, “is a giant compared to our little friend the dabchick, and altogether makes a more respectable appearance, both in picture and pond. The habits and figure of the two birds, though, are much the same. There are numbers of loons on the ‘broads’ of Norfolk. Indeed it is in East Anglia that I have most especially watched the dabchick. These loons, like the lesser grebes, incubate and leave their eggs in the wet, and meet with the same ridiculous failure when they attempt to walk. Like them, they are capital divers, and begin from the egg.”
THE CORMORANT.
Close to the divers in the natural system of birds come the cormorants, whose powers of swimming are in no way inferior to those of the species we have just named. They swim so low in the water that nothing but the head, neck, and top of the back appear above the surface. The tail, composed of stiff elastic feathers, is submerged and used as a rudder, and the wings as oars. The address with which they dive, and the rapidity of their movements, are wonderful; no less so than the pertinacity with which they pursue their prey. Voracious in the extreme,—
“Insatiate cormorant.”
Richard II. Act ii. Sc. 1;