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 &quot;teeter-snipe&quot; 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 



