° i9i5 J Bailey, Plum Island Night Herons. 435 



sign in arrangement. Soon entering the sand hills again I came at 

 length to the immediate vicinity of the rookery, well screened and 

 hidden from the casual passerby in its secluded hollow. A few 

 birds are to be seen sailing too and from the shore or from their 

 quest out on the acres of marshland. But for these few voyagers 

 one might never suspect the close proximity of such a colony. 



Before exposing myself to view, I prepared my camera, with the 

 vain hope of securing a picture of the birds as they would take 

 flight when I appeared on the rim of the basin. Several hundreds 

 of them arose with much tumult of flapping and squawking when 

 I first gained the top of the slope and came fairly into view. Such a 

 lively scene of wild life and activity as they present at such a time, 

 would be well worthy the attempt of a professional photographer 

 to portray, but my attempts in this instance were unsatisfactory, 

 for reasons previously noted. 



By this date the serious business of housekeeping engaged the 

 time and attention of nearly all the herons. Only in one or two 

 instances did I note birds carrying nest building materials and 

 only a few comparatively fresh sets of eggs. By far the greater 

 number of nests contained eggs well advanced in incubation and 

 not a few already contained young birds, of varying days of age. 

 Climbing one of the first good sized trees that I came to, a red 

 maple containing four or five nests, I found in one of these 

 a couple of yellow eyed, frightened young, just arriving at the 

 "pin feather" age, their primaries and longer tail feathers just 

 beginning to be prominent. I endeavored to obtain the portraits 

 of these two interesting fledglings, but later the dark room again 

 pronounced failure, not however because of the bad behavior of 

 my subjects for they were as quiet and accommodating as heron 

 manners would permit. 



The tardiness of the season was illustrated in the vegetable world 

 by the condition of the shad trees here, many of them being just 

 in bloom, nearly or quite a month later than their usual time on 

 normal seasons inland. The backward season, however, apparently 

 made little difference in the heron world for conditions here on this 

 date were similar to those on a like date during a normal season. 



In the midst of my investigations today, being intent on the many 

 interesting things going on around me, a smart shower came up, 



