Dancing Queen

Linlithgow Loch, created millennia ago when glacial deposits changed the course of the River Avon, has been home to mankind since earliest times as witnessed by the remains of crannogs on the lake.  Now, it lies in the middle of the ancient royal burgh, surrounded by housing and close to the traffic roar of the M9. Despite all this, it abounds with bird life especially water fowl. A stroll round the perimeter in the early morning was accompanied by a chorus of from thrushes, blackbirds, robins and wrens, surely the champions in the size to volume stakes.

Mute swans, coots, moor-hens, mallards, tufted ducks, herring gulls, and the occasional escaped, domestic duck or goose all went about their business –  feeding, fishing, nesting, courting – unaffected by the human activity surrounding them.

Nesting Coot

 It wasn't these that I had come to see.

Great Crested Grebe

 It was the great crested grebes and their elaborate “dance” as they bond into mating pairs. I was not disappointed. They performed on cue.

Bobbing and dipping, separating and coming together, swimming in line and then together, it was a privilege to witness such a rare display in an urban setting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORqblRpH9Eg 

Linlithgow Palace, birthplace of James V and Mary, Queen of Scots overlooks the loch. The young princess must have seen the dance of the great crested grebes from the palace windows.

Married to the Dauphin she spent her early adult life in France and indulged her love of dancing at the French court. It is said that on her return to assume the crown of Scotland, she brought the refined dances in the French style to her native land.

The style of contre-dansant became translated into “country dancing” where the partners face each other and bow and set before separating and joining in a stylised pattern.

I wonder if she thought of the grebes she had watched in childhood as she tried to get the rougher elements of the sixteenth century Scottish nobility to pas de bas or dance a schottische.

Thankfully, the grebes, brought to the brink of extinction by our Victorian forefathers who used their feathers to decorate women's hats, were saved to thrive again beneath Mary's windows and perform their stately dance.