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 



