Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 5 (1901).djvu/377

recorded of a unique nature. Other birds act, sometimes, in more or less the same way. I have seen a pair of Shags at the nest (but not whilst occupied in building it) hold between them a piece of seaweed, and move their heads about with it in a strange half-coquettish manner, as though they knew what they meant. I have seen Gulls and the Great Skua pick a blade or two of grass, and then run with it to the partner bird, apparently only to show it, for it was dropped and not used in building the nest, which was not just in that place. Each time there was a peculiar kind of consciousness in the manner and look of either bird, impossible not to notice and equally so to describe. I have also seen one of two rival Wheatears, in the midst of violently excited movements, catch up a piece of grass or stick, and run and lay it in a depression of the ground out of which it had just started. In most of these cases, as it has appeared to me, the object thus seized hold of is in the nature of a symbol. That anything used in the construction of the nest should—during the nuptial season—fill the bird's mind with a picture of its construction, and with all the ideas and associations connected with this, we can understand; and, as male birds fight together, at this time, for the possession of the female, it does not seem impossible that a vision of what such possession implies should sometimes pass through the mind of either combatant, when not in the actual frenzy of combat. In the case of the Wheatear, however, there may be another way of explaining this action, to which I will recur. In the other instances its symbolic nature seems more apparent. Especially is this the case with these two Grebes. They seized hold of and moved about with the weed, very much as a man might seize and wave a banner, and a certain set of pleasurable ideas and emotions—to do with nest-building, courtship, dalliance on the nest—became, as it were, focussed by their doing so. Held by both, it was a symbol of what both felt, and of all that related to their mutual affection. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that the birds were conscious of the symbolical meaning of what they did in the way in which a man would be, but if their action was not in its essential nature symbolical, then will anyone explain its precise significance, and why it was so immediately followed by an eager