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When roused they fly sluggishly away uttering a resounding cry. Their food 
consists of moles, mice, birds, fishes, leeches, snakes, frogs, beetles, ete., and 
is taken by night. They will swallow whole birds and fishes of considerable 
size. The best known characteristic of the Bittern is its peculiar cry or ‘‘boom,” 
from which it derives many of its curious names. ‘The sound is so strange that 
it has given rise to various superstitions, being doubtless more alarming from 
the solitariness of the places it was generally heard in. The peasantry supposed 
that the bird thrust its bill into a reed to serve as a pipe for swelling the note 
above its natural pitch. Others thought that it thrust its bill into the mud or 
water, and by violently blowing, produced its booming. ‘The real fact is that 
the Bittern usually booms when soaring with a spiral flight high in the air in 
the evening. It booms six or eight times at once. 
The nest is made of sticks and weeds placed in the thickest place it can find 
close to the water. The eggs are pale brown, and four or five in number. 
In the winter of 1830-31, Bitterns were unusually abundant 
throughout the country ; eight being obtained in the neighbourhood 
of Carlisle. A Bittern was shot in the winter of 1873 on Sellafield 
Tarn, in Beckermet parish. It had alighted amongst the bull- 
rushes, and had it not been wantonly destroyed, would probably 
have remained about the tarn, which is exactly the kind of place it 
would naturally haunt, in company with the Coots and Mallards. 
Another was shot the following winter on the River Calder, about 
a quarter of a mile from the tarn, In 1876 a third was killed 
close to Wreay Castle, Windermere, by Mr. D. Ainsworth. A 
fourth in 1879 was shot at Braystones Tarn, about a mile and a 
half from Sellafield Tarn. Some years ago a fifth was shot by Mr. 
Vickers of Birkby Crag as it flew over his yard in the dusk. It is 
a great pity that this beautiful and interesting bird is never allowed 
a chance of remaining where it would probably breed were it not 
so uniformly persecuted. 
A few miles to the south of this town is a long low slip of land 
hemmed in between the river and the sea, about two miles in length, 
and composed almost entirely of sand and shingle. The wind and 
storm of many years have tossed and driven the sand into hollows 
and ridges of most abrupt and fantastic shapes. You toil upa 
gently rising slope of sand, sinking to the ankle at every step, only 
to find when you reach the summit, that the ground descends 
