The Great Crested Grebe

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

In her acceptance speech at the 2022 Oldie of the Year awards, Dame Jane Goodall said chimpanzees differ from humans by only just over one per cent.

Her Kenyan mentor, Dr Louis Leakey, chose her to do the chimpanzee study because she had not been to university. So she had a mind uncluttered by the arrogant scientific assumption that animals are inferior to humans. She duly found animals – famously, chimpanzees – ‘more like us than we like to think’.

Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, often under natural conditions. One of its founding fathers was Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975), who in spring 1912 spent a fortnight’s holiday with his brother Trevenen studying the courtship of great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus) on the four Tring Reservoirs, Hertfordshire.

The resulting scientific paper, The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe, remains a milestone in ethological history.

Huxley wrote, ‘A good glass, a notebook, some patience and a spare fortnight in the spring – with these, I not only managed to discover many unknown facts about the crested grebe, but also had one of the pleasantest of holidays. “Go thou and do likewise.” ’

In a footnote, he clarified the creed of modern ethology: ‘Let it never be forgotten that emotions and attitudes are just as much characters as are colours or structures.’

Great crested grebes winter in coastal flocks, returning inland to breed in February. In March, they pair up, with much chasing about on open water. Once they’ve paired, a nest is built among reeds, on which coition follows.

It is succeeded by as ritualistic a courtship as that of any bird. The great crested’s ear-like tippets and ruffs were feather features treasured by the 19th-century fashion trade, almost to the species’s extinction. They are pricked and fanned in open water as the couple head-shake, bow, crouch, dive and even rear upright like penguins to face each other beak to beak, proffering weed tokens fetched from the depths.

In humans and most birds, courting precedes coition. Huxley nevertheless viewed the post-coition courtship in his grebes as ‘an expression of emotion not very different’ from our own, sealed with a passionate kiss.

The great crested has as famous a place in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction as in Huxley’s scientific writings.

In Scoop, Waugh’s satire on journalism, its hero, the naïve and country-bound William Boot, is unexpectedly promoted to become a war correspondent for the Daily Beast

The promotion comes about because Boot’s fortnightly column of nature notes, Lush Places, has provoked a prodigious mail from readers – his manuscript on the badger having been doctored by his mischievous sister to read ‘great crested grebe’.

Irate bird-lovers accused him of condoning the bird’s baiting by terriers; and suggesting it attacked young rabbits.

According to Selina Hastings (Evelyn Waugh: A Biography), Waugh’s hostility to the great crested grebe arose from his being forced by his host, after a long lunch on a country weekend, to take a walk to see one nesting.

The 2023 Bird of the Month calendar, with Oldie illustrations, is available from www.carryakroyd.co.uk