Xehraska Omitholoiists' Union 63 



15, Ardca herodias Liuneaeus — Great Blue Heron. 



Durin? June, 1911, and throughout the summer of 1912, 

 I saw Gi-eat Blue Herons on the Middle Loup, and on 

 several trips to the Dismal river in the latter year also 

 found the birds, wading solemnly over the sandbars and 

 through the shallows or standing motionless— slim gray 

 shadows, hardly to be noticed until some movement be- 

 trayed their presence. At dusk they often showed black 

 against the sun on the water or loomed up big as they 

 flew overhead, now and then uttering a harsh, discordant 

 squawk. Not infrequently I would hear them dov/n on 

 the river in the middle of the night, when their voices^ 

 not the most musical at any time, would assume an added 

 weirdness. Once in the spring I saw a small group of 

 the herons in the valley back from the river but they 

 seemed to have no particular business to perform there 

 and flew abruptly on being approached, only to alight on 

 the nearest hillside. At times, too, they would alight 

 on the hill tops near the Keserve station and stand motion- 

 less or stalk gravely along the summit. On the evening 

 of May 21, 1912, a flock numbering thirty or forty flew 

 overhead, going eastward, but these were, I suspect, the 

 members of a nesting colony. 



Such a colony I knew to be located somewhere back in 

 the hills but although I learned of the general location 

 of the place from different persons who had been there, 

 no one seemed able to furnish me wnth accurate directions 

 for reaching the place. On May 19, 1912, I set out with 

 several of the forestry men in an attempt to find the 

 pocket in which grew the little grove of trees where the 

 herons had chosen to build their nests. After most of a 

 day spent in quartering the ground for miles in every di- 

 rection from a point v/hich we had chosen as a center of 

 operations, we had almost made up our minds to give 

 up the search or try in some other direction when a heron 

 was noted overhead, apparently returning from a fishing 

 trip on the Dismal. We followed it with our eyes and saw 

 it alight scarcely a half mile away in what appeared to be 

 a patch of low grooving bushes in a shallow depression. 

 When the place was reached the shallow depression was 

 found to bo a deep but not extensive valley, and the low 

 bushes the tops of hackberry trees twenty or thirty feet in 

 height. The trees formed a circular grove seventy-five or a 



