BIRDS OF MINNESOTA. 93 



opposite sides are horizontal, but approximated in a verticle 

 plane; they reach nearly to the tip of the tail, sometimes be- 

 yond it; bill black, yellow at base, including the loral region 

 and around the eye, as well as a larger basal portion of the 

 lower mandible; legs black; lower part of tarsus behind and 

 the toes yellow; color of plumage throughout pure white. 



Length. 24; wing, 10.20; tarsus, 3.80; bill, 3.15. 



Habitat, Temperate and Tropical America. 



ARDEA TIRESCENS L. (201.) 



GREEN HERON. 



A common summer resident, found along those of our inland 

 streams which meander the meadows and the marshes with a 

 sluggish current, after the 10th of April. It is seldom that an 

 hour's hunt along their rank grassy, reedy borders does not 

 give one a sight of one or two of them. They commence 

 building as early occasionally as the first of May in small com- 

 munities, but usually about the 5th. a loose, bulky, flat nest of 

 sticks, twigs and leaves, placed in the tops or branches of 

 small trees in thickets. They lay about four pale-blue eggs, 

 sometimes only three and sometimes five. They rear two 

 broods usually. 



Their food embraces frogs, fishes, slugs, cray-fish. worms, 

 &c., which they obtain abundantly enough to make them re- 

 main in a single spot for hours when undisturbed, under which 

 circumstances their maneuvers may be watched with a glass 

 with great satisfaction, provided a position has been attained 

 without the knowledge of the bird. This is no easy task, for 

 their telescopic eyes take in every moving thing possible con- 

 siderable distances away. More frequently one will find him 

 standing in several inches of water, close to that which is still 

 deeper, and as motionless as if he were grown there, with his 

 head resting back upon his breast, and woe betide the reptile or 

 fish that ventures within the radial possibilities of that neck 

 and unerring bill. He never strikes by guess, and rarely with- 

 out securing his victim, which is swallowed invariably head 

 foremost, in the twinkling of an eye. He does not ordinarily 

 thresh the ground with his game as the Greater Bittern often 

 does, to reduce it to flexibility, or fractures, in order to swallow 

 it, but selects the size best adapted to the capacities of his 

 throat. When fishing for frogs specially his methods are 

 somewhat modified. Instead of retaining his fixed attitude, 

 which the frogs soon learn to j-ecognize when their heads are 



