V ° 1- i*li Vin ] Brewster, Nuptial Plumes of Bitterns. 95 



I have said it opened out rather slowly as a rule and never very 

 abruptly. Its disappearance was effected in a correspondingly 

 deliberate manner. 



On reaching home late this afternoon I at once examined all 

 the Bitterns in my collection. Most of them are females or males 

 killed in autumn, none of which have pronounced white or whitish 

 anywhere about the wings. But four adult males taken in spring 

 possess tufts of yellowish white feathers, soft and more or less 

 downy in texture, which are attached to the sides of the breast 

 under the shoulders. By erecting and spreading these feathers 

 I have been able to produce something resembling what we saw 

 in Concord. The Concord birds, however, apparently had plumes 

 more than double the size of those possessed by any of my skins 

 and pure, not yellowish, white. When I gave an account of the 

 matter at a meeting of the Nuttall Club this evening one of the 

 members (Mr. Freeman) suggested that the Bittern may inflate 

 the skin to which the plumes are attached, thus causing them 

 to stand out further than they can be made to do in the dried 

 skin. Even if this be so I doubt if feathers no longer or more 

 numerous than those of my specimens could expand into the 

 broad, full, snowy ruffs shown by the Bitterns seen yesterday and 

 today at Concord. It is conceivable, of course, that the ruffs 

 displayed by the living birds were less large and white than they 

 appeared. I should suspect that this may have been the case were 

 it not that the observations I have just noted were made with care 

 by five different persons and under widely varying conditions of 

 light and shade. Hence I have felt justified in recording our 

 mutual impressions of what we saw despite the fact that my skins 

 of Bitterns do not seem to altogether confirm them. 



Concord, April 20, 1910. Clear and warm with fresh south- 

 west wind. 



I returned to Concord late this afternoon provided with a gun 

 and determined to kill a Bittern if I could get a shot at one that 

 showed white ruffs. Three males began pumping about six o'clock. 

 Two of them were far out in the open meadows. The third, at 

 the edge of the river, was accompanied by a smaller, duller plumaged 

 bird which, without doubt, was a female and his mate. I watched 

 this pair for more than half an hour. The male pumped at fre- 



