COMMON HERON. 139 
but when the nests are numerous, the stench from this 
waste food is extremely offensive. Two broods are 
usually reared in the same year, and, according to the 
authors above quoted, “‘a notion is prevalent amongst 
the country people that the second set of eges is incu- 
bated by the young of the first brood.”* Young herons, 
as Mr. Gurney informs me, are excellent eating just 
before they leave the nest, but afterwards become both 
poor and fishy. 
That the heron attains occasionally to a great age 
and yearly visits the same breeding place, has been 
satisfactorily proved in more than one instance, through 
birds being taken with a thin copper plate attached to the 
leg bearing the date of some former capture. In 1844, 
according to Messrs. Broderick and Salvin,+ a beron, 
on its “passage” to the Didlington heronry, was taken 
by Mr. Newcome’s hawks near Hockwold, bearing a 
label with the inscription “Colonel Wilson, Didlington, 
1829,” proving that it had been caught in the same 
neighbourhood fifteen years before ;{ and this same bird 
* Mr. F. Frere, on a recent visit to the Fritton heronry, was 
informed by the keeper that “the birds lay a first clutch of eggs, 
which take three weeks to hatch; after about a fortnight they lay 
as many more, which are hatched off with the young birds in the 
nest.” 
+ “Falconry in the British Isles,” p. 75, pl. xxiv., fig. 1. 
ft A similar instance, showing a far greater age in the bird 
taken, is thus recorded in the “ Annual Register” for the year 
1767 (p. 107), under date July 7th:—‘As the Prince Stadtholder 
[of Holland] was taking the diversion of hawking, he caught a 
heron with a brass inscription round his legs, setting forth that he 
was taken and released by the elector of Cologne in the year 1737.” 
In Colonel Hamilton’s “ Reminiscences of a Sportsman” (vol. ii, 
p- 218) a grey heron is also stated to have been “ shot in the Habra, 
a subdivision of Oran in Algeria,” in 1858, which had attached to 
one of its legs “a copper ring, bearing the Royal crown of Holland, 
and, in English, an inscription “ Royal Hawking Club, 1850, Loo, 
Netherlands.” 
Pe 
