COMMON HERON. 273 



GRA LLA TORES. A RDEID^K. 



THE COMMON HERON. 



ARDEA CINEREA. 

 Chorra-riathach. Chorra-ghlas. 



THIS well-known bird is abundant in all the western counties, and 

 also throughout the Long Island, or Outer Hebrides. It is equally 

 distributed over the inner group of islands where there are several 

 heronries. On the mainland, these interesting nurseries occur at 

 intervals, from the north-west of Sutherland to Wigtownshire. 

 In many of the wilder districts, where trees are either of stunted 

 growth, or entirely absent, the sites selected are very different 

 from those one is accustomed to see in cultivated localities.* Mr 

 Colin M'Vean has sent me word that he lately visited one of the 

 largest heronries he ever saw; it was on the point of Ardnamurchan, 

 where the rocks are tolerably steep, and covered with ivy and 

 shrubs, among which the herons had built their nests. It was an 

 extraordinary sight, when pulling along shore, to find hundreds 

 of young birds sitting on the ledges, and stretching their long 

 necks to look down at the party in the boat. After the families 

 are reared, they appear to keep very much together, flying in 

 company even to distant places on their fishing expeditions. On 

 some of the west country lochs, I have seen, in September, as many 

 as nineteen of these birds together in a group, and Mrs Blackburn, 

 in her beautiful book on "British Birds drawn from Nature," men- 

 tions having counted twenty-three herons at once on the shores of 

 Loch Aylort ; one of the plates in the work referred to represents 

 a group of eighteen observed at Lochiel side. 



According to Pennant, heronries in woods had, in his time, been 

 much more crowded than similar settlements of the present day. 

 One, in particular, deserves mention, as showing how birds will 

 take the fullest advantage of strict protection when it is given 

 them. Writing of Lincolnshire and its ornithology, he thus 

 proceeds : " But the greatest curiosity in these parts is the vast 

 heronry at Cressi Hall, six miles from Spalding. The Herons 

 resort there in February to repair their nests, settle there in the 



* Dr Dewar informs me that a solitary nest was observed on the face of a 

 cliff, in the island of Kum, in 1869. 



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