nest. It is that portion of the throat which lies just below the bird's gape (I am here speaking of the shag), including both the feathered and the naked skin between the cleft of the lower mandible, and extending to the sides of the neck, which is principally twitched or quivered.
The above, perhaps, is a trivial observation, but no one can watch these birds very closely without being struck by the habit.
Young shags are, at first, naked and black—also blind, as I was able to detect through the glasses. Afterwards the body becomes covered with a dusky grey down, and then every day they struggle more and more into the likeness of their parents. They soon begin to imitate the grown-up postures, and it is a pretty thing to see mother and young one sitting together with both their heads held stately upright, or the little woolly chick standing up in the nest and hanging out its thin little featherless wings, just as mother is doing, or just as it has seen her do. At other times they lie sprawling together either flat or on their sides. They are good-tempered and playful, seize playfully hold of each other's bills, and will often bite and play with the feathers of their parent's tail. In fact, they are a good deal like puppies, and the heart goes out both to them and to their loving, careful, assiduous mother and father. As pretty domestic scenes are enacted daily and hourly on this stern old rock, within the very heave and dash of the waves, as ever in Arcadia, or in any neat little elegant bower where the goddess of such things presides—or does not. The sullen sea itself might smile to watch its
