The great crested grebe, or loon, 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 in 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. A most accurate and patient observer and friend of birds, beasts, and little boys (the Rev. J. C. Atkinson), with whom I have had many a day's nesting and rabbiting, states that "the first lessons of the young loon in diving are taken beneath the literal shelter of their mother's wing." In this case, supposing the instinctive expectancy of the newly hatched led them to wait for the signal from the parent hatcher, and defer their infant plunge till the old bird dived with them, these young loons would prove an exacting family to a domestic hen. Possibly she might fancy them less disappointing than ducks;

F

while in truth, like many an anxious and gratified mother, she would be attributing their abstinence to nature rather than to artificial deference, or absence of contagious example.

ROOKS.

WAS brought up in the society of rooks, and taught from earliest childhood to look upon them as sacred My grandfather never would allow them to be shot. They used to walk up quite close to the windows of the old library, where he sat among his books, as much at home as he. And when he went out, as he often did, to look at the cows, and scratch the pigs with his spud, or give a carrot to his favourite old piebald, now past work, and made free of the paddock for the rest of his days, the rooks knew him well. They filled two clusters of high trees close to the house; the carriage road passed through one, and my grandfather always said he could tell when a stranger came, by the observations of the rooks; their note was then uneasy: if the stranger stopped and made gestures at them with a stick, such as putting it to his shoulder like a gun, the rooks were unequivocally offended. They took short

68

Language of Rooks.

flights from tree to tree, and tremendous breakneck hops among the upper boughs, as much as to say, "Can't the fellow see he is troublesome!"

The language of rooks is very effective. I do not know a more plaintive lamentation than that of the parent birds, while their young ones are being shot. Afraid as they are of a gun, ready as they generally are to be gone directly they catch a glimpse of one, they will not leave the rookery then, but beat the air around the trees from morning till evening, while their full-grown children drop in helpless succession. The young rooks, or perchers, as they are called, leave the nest-which indeed would not hold more than one of them by this time, they having grown as big as the mother bird—about the latter end of May, and sit on neighbouring twigs.

Some morning, while all is going on as usual, after the parents have been out in the fresh early sunshine gathering food for their families, while they see their young ones on the very edge of flight, in a few days ready to plunge with them from off the top branches of the elm, and swim for the first time in air—just when the critical moment of joy at the perfect success of a hatch has come, and father and

grandfather, the young couple now proud of their firstlings, and the many-wintered crow who long has "led the clanging rookery home," are cawing gravely but pleasantly about the joys and trials of the passing season-some brisk snobs arrive beneath the trees. They have come for the day, evidently; they have brought a hamper with lunch.

"Picnic?" says a two-year old rook, to an elderly bird sitting close by him, who shakes his head.

It is a day's rook shooting. Presently the snobs get out their neat little pea-rifles, and load; and then, there is wailing in the air; the perchers hop and sidle as bullet after bullet whistles by. Phit! crack! puff! phit! thud! down they tumble, and spread their tails, and clench their claws as they lie where they have fallen to the ground.

They will be picked up and counted in the evening-perhaps while the gentlemen are at

lunch.

Meanwhile, the helpless ranks are thinned, and the screaming parent birds fly wildly round and round, now and then plunging down to alight for a moment by their doomed offspring. Ay! yes, down on the very twigs from which several have dropped already, till the agony