Page:BirdWatchingSelous.djvu/192

the great crested grebe and other birds—the cormorant itself—with whom it has no close affinities. But this cannot be said without considerable qualification, for, though the description I have given is from the life and seen over and over again, yet at other times the dive down of this bird is so totally different that no one who had seen only the one could think it capable of the other. In the winter, coots swim about in flocks, and then one may see first one little spray of water thrown up as a bird disappears, and then another. That is all; there is the spray and there is no bird, whereas just before there was one. Indeed, I think it is a quicker dive than any that I have seen a sea-bird make, only equalled, perhaps (or even, perhaps, not quite equalled), by that of a really alarmed dabchick. As for the process of it, it is undiscoverable, the eye catches only the spray-jet, which is pretty and always just the same. But there is no disorder, no higgledy-piggledy mess. It is something which you can't see, but which you feel is the act of a master. Here again, then, the coot in diving is quite the moor-hen's superior. The dive of the latter bird is, as we have said, archaic. It is unpolished, and greatly wants form and style. Now, the coot is fin-footed—that is to say, the skin of the toes is extended so as to form on the interspace of each joint a thin lobe-shaped membrane. In this formation, which likewise distinguishes the grebes, we may, perhaps, see the gradual steps by which the feet of some more purely aquatic birds have become webbed. As the lobes became larger they would have met and overlapped, and from this to an actual fusion does not