Little Green Heron 259 



a stump or snag among the sedges and bushes 

 by the waterside, so dark and still is he. Herons 

 are accused of the tropical vice of laziness ; but 

 surely a bird that travels from northern Canada 

 to the tropics and back again every year to 

 earn its living, as the little green heron does, 

 is not altogether lazy. Startle him, and he 

 springs into the air with a loud squawk, flap- 

 ping his broad wings and trailing his greenish- 

 yellow legs behind him, like the storks you see 

 painted on Japanese fans. 



He and his mate have long, dark-green crests 

 on their odd-shaped, receding heads and some 

 lengthened, pointed feathers between the shoul- 

 ders of their green or grayish-green hunched 

 backs. Their figures are rather queer. The 

 reddish-chestnut colour on their necks fades 

 into the brownish-ash of their under parts, 

 divided by a line of dark spots on the white 

 throat that widen on the breast. Although 

 the Httle green heron is the smallest member of 

 this tribe of large birds that we see in the 

 Northern States and Canada, it is about a foot 

 and a half long, larger than any bird, except 

 one of its own cousins, that you are likely to 

 see in its marshy haunts. 



Unlike many of their kind a pair of these 

 herons prefer to build their rickety nests apart 

 by themselves rather in one of those large, 

 sociable, noisy and noisome colonies which we 



