ioo THE CONDOR VOL. IX up till he has made a complete revolution in his shell, and the end or cap of the egg, cut clear around, drops off, and the youngster soon kicks himself out into the sunshine. It does not take his coat long to dry; in fact, he often does not give it a chance, for his first impulse seems to be to take to water and ride on his mother's or father's back. The grebe chick never stays in the nest longer than a few hours. THE NE3.R BIRD IS CARRYING ?- CHICK ON ITS B?-CK, TIlE IlEAD OF THE YOUNGST'I?R JUST SH(V?,'ING camera. It took patience to sit there in a squatted position for hours at a time. The chances for pictures were often few and far between; but we had good opportunities to study these wild and wary birds. ?Ve could see many things with the eye, by ?vatchingthru the thick reeds, that could not be caught with the cainera. The first day, as I lay hidden in the rules waiting for a picture, I saw a pair of grebes swimming along only twenty feet distant. I could catch glimpses of them as they passed just beyond their nest. One of the birds carried A chick that is just hatched is clothed in the most deli- cate coat of soft gray fur, lighter below and darker on top. A grebe is one of the shyest of all birds to photo- graph, for at the slightest sound or motion, it disap- pears like a flash. He stays under water quite a while, and next time he appears he is probably fifty yards away. For two dif- ferent days we sneaked about at the edge of the water in the high tules and tried for pictures of these birds. We had to part the reeds and build them up about us so that we were completely hidden and had only a narrow place out of which we could aim our YOUNG ?VESTERN GREBE LIFTED OUT OF VgATER ON END OF OA.R a chick on its back. The grebes have a way of taking their young xvith then?, for the little fellows lie on the back just under the wing-coverts with only the head sticking out. At the slightest alarm, the mother raises the feathers a trifle and covers the chick completely. One can readily tell when a grebe has a chick on
