TANGLE-LEAF PAPERS 53 
mage. The blue-jays are aware of their dan- 
ger, and resort to mob-law whenever a hawk or 
owl is discovered. I have seen a hundred 
blue-jays bonded together and worrying one 
little screech-owl. The grosbeaks protect 
themselves as best they can by keeping well 
within thickets and thorny close-topped trees. 
Along our rivers and brooks live a great 
many aquatic and semi-aquatic birds, whose 
traits and peculiar characteristics seem not to 
have been very closely noted by our natural- 
ists. 
I have mentioned the motions and attitudes 
of birds as partaking of the general tone of 
their surroundings. ‘This is particularly ob- 
servable in the herons, sand-pipers, plovers, 
bitterns, and many shore birds. The motion- 
less, dreamy appearance of the heron as it 
stands in the edge of a still gray pool of water 
is in perfect keeping with all the features and ac- 
cessories of a tarn. So the wavering, tilting 
motion of the little sand-pipers accords harmo- 
niously with the rippling surface of running 
water. So accentuated is this light see-saw 
movement of one of the lesser sand-pipers, 
that the bird is called “teeter-snipe” by the coun- 
try folk. The kill-deer plover, common in our 
damp meadows and fallow lands, has a way of 
running in the low grass and stubble that ren- 
ders it very hard to follow with the eye, and, 
when it stops, its outlines are so shadowy and 
so intimately blent with the gray-brown back- 
ground that one has to look sharply to dis- 
cover it. The little green heron of our brooks 
and rivulets has a habit of sitting on old heaps 
of drift-wood, where he looks for all the world 
like an upright stick or piece of bark. When 
