the female bird rises a little on the nest, and each time there is a gleam like snow and the gloom seems deeper against the cut outline of a pure white egg. How full of poetry and interest it is lying there; how unmeaning and, one may almost say, absurd in a cabinet!"
The nest of the shag is continually added to by the male, not only whilst the eggs are in process of incubation, but after they are hatched, and when the young are being brought up. In a sense, therefore, it may be said to be never finished, though to all practical purposes it is, before the female bird begins to sit. That up to this period the female as well as the male bird takes part in the building of the nest I cannot but think, but from the time of my arrival on the island I never saw the two either diving for or carrying seaweed together. Of course, if all the hen birds were sitting this is accounted for, but from the courting antics which I witnessed, and for some other reasons, I judged that this was not the case. Once I saw a pair of birds together high up on the cliffs, where some tufts of grass grew in the niches. One of these birds, only, pulled out some of the grass, and flew away with it accompanied by the other one. It is not only seaweed that is used by these birds in the construction of the nest. In many that I saw, grass alone was visible (though I have no doubt seaweed was underneath it); and one, in particular, had quite an ornamental appearance, from being covered all over with some land-plant having a number of small blue flowers; and this I have observed in other nests, though not to the same extent. A fact like this is interesting when we remember the bower-birds, and the way in which they
