In a Heron Village 229 



self up as a parrot does. Not so with the young blue 

 herons ; they are as awkward about the limbs of the trees 

 as their parents are stately in moving through the air. 

 When overbalanced on a limb they often fall to the 

 ground. 



The young birds of both species seem instinctively to 

 know that falling from the trees to the ground below 

 means death. Not because they are hurt in the least by 

 the fall, but because the old birds never descend to the 

 ground below the nest tree. The ground under the trees 

 was strewn with the dead bodies of young birds. The 

 young are fed only in the tree-top, and those below starve 

 in the very sight of their parents. 



Several times we saw young night herons hanging 

 dead in the branches of the trees. In one tree we found 

 two of these youngsters hanging side by side only a foot 

 apart. In walking about the limbs, the larger of the two 

 birds had caught its foot in a crotch and hung itself head 

 downward. That, in itself, was not unusual, but the second 

 bird hung by the neck only a few inches away. It seems 

 that this smaller heron had hung himself dead rather than 

 fall to the ground; he had fallen or overbalanced on the 

 small limb and, as is the custom, had hooked his chin 

 over the branch to keep from falling to the ground. His 

 clutched right foot showed that the death struggle had 

 been a reaching and stretching to gain the limb. The 

 head was not caught between the branches as was the 

 other bird's foot, but was simply hooked over the bend in 

 the twig. Had he thrown his head back a little he would 

 have dropped to the ground. We demonstrated this by 

 turning the bill to an angle of forty-five degrees, and the 



