152 GRALL^E. 



frogs, snails, worms, and the fry of fishes, it has the flood 

 higher at the time of commencing the nest, than it is likely 

 to be during the incubation. The nest is constructed wholly 

 of vegetable matters rushes, the leaves of reeds, and those 

 of the stronger marsh grasses. The eggs are four or five, of 

 a greenish brown colour ; the incubation lasts about twenty- 

 five days, and three weeks more elapse before the young are 

 fit for leaving the nest. When they break the shell, they are 

 callow, and have a scraggy appearance ; but they are labo- 

 riously fed by the parents, and acquire better forms at the 

 same time that they gain their plumage. 



The bittern is both a solitary and a peaceful bird ; ani 

 excepting the small fishes, reptiles, and other little animals 

 on which it feeds, it offers harm to nothing, animal or vege- 

 table. Unless when the male booms and bleats, or rather 

 bellows and neighs his rude song, the birds are seldom heard, 

 and not often seen, unless sometimes in the severe weather, 

 when they are frozen out, and descend lower down the 

 country in quest of food. They keep in their rushy tents as 

 long as the weather is open, and they can by their long 

 and powerful bills find their food among the roots of these ; 

 and they probably also in part subsist upon the seeds, or even 

 the albuminous roots, of some of the aquatic plants ; but their 

 feet, which are adapted for rough and spongy surfaces, do 

 not hold well on the ice ; at all events, in the places where 

 I used to know them, when the interstices of the plants and 

 the margins of the pools were so far frozen that they would 

 bear, and the wild-goose had been driven from more northern 

 haunts by the severity of the weather, the bitterns were not 

 to be found by the most diligent search in the withered tufts, 

 though if they had the habit of converting the earth into a 

 musical instrument, these would be the times at which it would 

 sound the best. On their departure from the upland moors, 

 they proceed gradually and skulkingly by the margins of the 



