HERON. 77 



attitudes imaginable; they appear to suffer also from frost 

 and cold.' If taken young, Herons may be easily reared, but 

 not otherwise. Two Herons have been known to fight so 

 desperately, that one of them allowed itself to be taken with 

 the hand. 



The fiight of the Heron, in which the wings are much 

 arched, and the neck doubled back, is slow and heavy, and 

 the long legs are carried straight out, projecting behind as if 

 a tail: the legs are drooped before alighting. They are able 

 to swim, but perform the operation slowly. Though generally 

 speaking of an awkward and ungainly appearance, yet the 

 different curvatures assumed by this bird in its positions 

 give it a line of beauty which the ornithologist at all events 

 can appreciate and admire. 



Herons are very voracious birds, and always seem hungry. 

 Their usual food consists of trout, flounders, eels, carp, and 

 other fish, which they swallow head foremost; water-lizards, 

 snakes, toads, frogs, rats (both land and water,) and mice; 

 the young of other birds, beetles, and other insects, shell-fish, 

 shrimps, and the roots and blossoms of plants: a trout has 

 been seen taken about four pounds weight. A curious cir- 

 cumstance is recorded in 'The Naturalist,' vol. i, page 61, by 

 Mr. Mc'Intosh, as related to him by an eye-witness, who, 

 having shot a Snipe, it was pounced upon by a Heron, not 

 previously observed by him, and shaken by it in his bill 

 till satisfied that it was quite dead. Another has been 

 known to quit the water to kill or disable an eel which it 

 had caught by beating it against the ground; and again 

 another, a tame one, to swim out ten or a dozen feet to 

 try to seize the brood of a Moorhen on a fallen tree. 



The hair, feathers, and bones of their prey are cast up in 

 pellets, after the manner of the Owls. 'It is perhaps worth 

 remarking, that when the Herons drop any of the food which 

 they bring to their young among the trees of the Heronry, 

 they make no attempt to recover it, but, probably from a 

 consciousness of their inability to rise from the ground in a 

 confined space, allow it to remain where it falls.' The result 

 is often beneficial to the neighbours, and a good pannier of 

 fish may often be collected under a large Heronry. The prey 

 is brought from a distance, it may be, of two miles or more 

 to the young, and much ado with snapping and chuckling 

 the latter make on the bringing home of each fresh supply. 

 They feed ordinarily in the mornings and evenings, but 



