Over the broad lake swept purple martins and white-breasted swallows, and nearer the shore fed peacefully a few pied-billed grebes, or dabchicks, birds that I had seen only two or three times before, and at which I looked more than once before I made out what they were.

In the course of the trip we saw, besides the species already named, great blue and little blue herons, pied-billed grebes, coots, cormorants, a flock of small sandpipers (on the wing), buzzards, vultures, fish-hawks, and innumerable red-winged blackbirds.

In addition to the birds already namedthree of them new to mewe had seen great blue herons, little blue herons, Louisiana herons, night herons, cormorants, pied-billed grebes, kingfishers, red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles, redpoll and myrtle warblers, savanna sparrows, tree swallows, purple martins, a few meadow larks, and the ubiquitous turkey buzzard.

There were ducks and gray geese, surf-scoters and guillemots, loons and pin-tail ducks and mergansers and grebes and oyster-catchers and sea-grouse.

But they no longer own the entire lake, for they have been obliged to share it with swans, grebes, coots, loons, fen-ducks, and a lot of others.

As long as you wild ducks still had the power on Takern, they did not wish to drain it, for, at least, they got some good out of you; but now, grebes and coots and other birds who are no good as food, have infested nearly all the reed-banks, and the people don't think they need let the lake remain on their account.

The grebes glided about with new feather-collars around the neck; and the jack-snipes were gathering straws for their nests.

He even warned the grebes, although he detested them because they crowded the ducks out of their best hiding-places.

I'm only a decoy-duck," that a grebe-nest came floating toward the shallows where he was tied.

It was a nest from the year before; and since grebe-nests are built in such a way that they can move on water like boats, it often happens that they drift out toward the lake.

" A few seconds later the grebe-nest lay near land, but the little oarsman did not leave it, but sat huddled up between branches and straw.

cried he, while he himself ran down to the grebe-nest and poled away from the shore.

"In this year (1487)," says the chronicler Monstrelet, "ladies ceased to wear trains, substituting for them trimmings of grebe, of martens' fur, of velvet, and of other materials, of about eighteen inches in width; some wore on the top of their heads rolls nearly two feet high, shaped like a round cap, which closed in above.

On Salars see L. Schram, The Monguors of Kansu, Philadelphia 1954, p. 23 and P. Pelliot; on Dungans see I. Grebe.

On the river and in the ponds we saw the finfoot, a bird with feet like a grebe and bill and tail like those of a darter, but, like so many South American birds, with no close affiliations among other species.

CHAPTER XXXI GULLS AND TERNS AT HOME Canada GooseAmerican Herring GullCommon TernLoonPied-billed Grebe.

"There will be great flocks of Wild Geese coming down from the North, and they often rest on the mill pond; or a Loon may chance down the river, and a Grebe or two.

"Grebes, not grubs," laughed the Doctor.

"Loons and Grebes are swimming birds, like Ducks or Gulls, but both belong to quite a different order from any of the others and each of them belongs to a family of its own.

Our familiar Pied-billed Grebe or Dabchick disappears so suddenly, that 'Water Witch' is one of its common names.

The Pied-billed Grebe, Dabchick, or Water Witch Length thirteen inches.

Feet very strange: they stick out far behind, because Grebes have no tail to be seen, and the toes are different from those of any other bird you have in your tables, being scalloped with flaps of skin instead of webbed like those of most Swimming Birds.

[Illustration: Pied-Billed Grebe.

Pied-billed Grebe Podilym'bus pod'iceps.

And they had to abstain from cutting up the grebes which are caught by the Carriers in great numbers every spring, because otherwise the blood with which these fowls abound would occasion haemorrhage or an unnaturally prolonged flux in the transgressor.