Great Northern?. Arthur Ransome
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it’s nesting,” thought Dick, “it’s eggs can’t have hatched yet. Or only just. But it’s too far off to see them.”
He kept perfectly still and watched, keeping the telescope trained on the sitting bird, thinking that if it moved again he would be able to see what sort of nest they made. There might be no nest at all. He remembered puffins and shelduck and their use of rabbit holes, and the many birds that laid their eggs on the bare ground, lapwings nesting in open fields, gulls with their eggs hard to see among the pebbles. He wondered whether these Divers took turns to sit on their eggs. If so, he wished the swimming bird would not take quite so long a turn in the water. At any minute now, Titty and Dorothea and the noisy Roger might be coming to hurry the Ship’s Naturalist back to the ship, not thinking for a moment that his adventure, of lying still and watching two dark blobs through a telescope, was more exciting than any they could have. Carefully he turned his head, but the bank above him made it impossible for him to see if they were coming down the valley. He turned back to his birds.
He wished he had had Captain Flint’s big binoculars instead of the little telescope which, useful as it was, did not show things large enough to let him see much at this distance. If only he had had a boat, so that he could row out nearer to the island and see what sort of nest the Divers made … He thought of the folding boat carried on the Sea Bear’s deck. But it was no good thinking he could persuade the scrubbers and painters to leave their job and bring it ashore and carry it to the loch. And anyhow, it was too late. There was a nest there all night. He was sure of that. Dick pulled out his notebook and scribbled in it, “Pair of Black-throated Divers on the lower loch. Nesting.”
Five minutes later, he pulled out the notebook again and put a question mark against what he had written. It may have been that the trout in the loch had begun their evening movement towards the shore and the Diver was moving after them to better fishing grounds. The swimming bird, with one dive after another, had come nearly half way from the island towards the place where Dick lay hid. He was getting a better view of it each time it came to the top of the water. Its head seemed very dark on the top, and the whole bird seemed even larger than he had thought it at first sight. It dived, and came up a minute later with a fish, struggled with it on the surface, swallowed it, sipped water, and swam nearer still. Dick was puzzled, but he knew very well that nothing is more difficult to judge than the size of things seen at a distance through a telescope. The bird dived again. Dick watched the spot where it had gone under, but it must have been swimming straight towards him. When it came up it was no more than thirty yards off, and Dick was so startled that he nearly shouted aloud.
“It’s a Great Northern,” he said to himself, and had added it to his list before he remembered that Great Northern Divers did not nest in Great Britain.
“It can’t be,” he said to himself. “But it isn’t a Black-throated.”
He made rather a mess of the pages in his notebook where he had written of those birds. He had drawn a line through “Black-throated” and had written “Great Northern” before, remembering that there could be no nest, he put a line through that. He jammed down some question marks.
Again he had a good view of the bird and saw clearly that it had two patches of black and white stripes on its dark neck.
“It is a Great Northern,” he said, made another entry in his book, and then, looking out once more at that dark blob of the bird on the island, still where it was, he crossed it out again and turned over a fresh page.
If only he had had the bird-book in his pocket. There was no time to go and fetch it. The only thing he could do would be to make a sketch of the bird’s head and neck and compare it with the picture in the book when he was back in the cabin of the Sea Bear. He made a drawing, not as good a drawing as Titty would have made, but showing clearly just how those two striped patches were placed on its neck. There could be no doubt that, whatever the bird was, it was different from the Black-throated Diver he had seen. He sketched in a small picture on the same page to show what its head had looked like. There could be no mistaking them. And this new bird was certainly a Diver. And it was not a Red-throated Diver. There was not a touch of red about it. What other Divers were there that it could be?
ANOTHER PAGE FROM DICK’S NOTEBOOK SHOWING THE TWO KINDS OF DIVERS
He was just finishing the drawing, had written “Great Northern Diver,” crossed it out, written it again, set a question mark beside it, and crossed out the question mark after yet another look at the bird, and put down a few more notes to help his memory, when he heard Roger call.
“Ahoy! Dick! Dick! Ahoy!”
Then Dorothea’s “Cooeee!”
The bird must have heard those shouts and seen the explorers. It was swimming fast towards the island, looking more than ever like a big grebe, swimming with its whole body under water and only its head showing.
Botheration! There was nothing to be done. Dick stood up, saw the explorers coming along at a jog trot and waved to them.
“Buck up!” shouted Roger.
Hurriedly stowing pocket-book and telescope, Dick climbed up from the shore.
“Back to the ship!” called Titty. “Quick.”
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