The Friends of Charles Darwin

The Great Crested Grebe, promoted by Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop to be the avian patron of journalists everywhere, has many unusual and appropriate habits. This bird needs a daily diet of light and fluffy feathers, either eaten from its own back or from the backs of friends and colleagues. It likes permanent liquid surroundings, and staggers inelegantly on land, particularly when failing to differentiate a road from a river at night. It depends on fiercer birds to protect the exclusivity of its possessions from rivals, and sometimes rewards those guards with a small egg in exchange.