Herons and Bitterns 



helpless fledgelings are found climbing about the nest while 

 there are still some dull, pale blue eggs unhatched in June, which 

 suggests the possibility of the extension of socialism into the 

 nurseries ; but who knows whether the rightful parents rear only 

 their own young ? 



Toward sunset all the eyries in the swamps are emptied, 

 and although, while the broods are young and incapable of mak- 

 ing any effort whatever, the old birds must go a-fishing by day 

 as well as at dusk, it is at twilight and later in the night that 

 these herons choose to disperse among the ditches, shores of 

 ponds and streams, the bogs and marshy meadows, to gorge 

 upon the teeming animal life there. Next to this bird's fondness 

 for an old, colonial homestead, its insatiable appetite is perhaps 

 its most prominent characteristic. Evidently the digestion of- a 

 young heron keeps in a state of perpetual motion. The old birds, 

 slender as they always are, grow perceptibly thinner while rais- 

 ing their two broods a year. A choking noise, like the painful 

 effort to bring up a fish that has taken a wrong course down the 

 bird's long throat, but which is only an attempt to sing or con- 

 verse, that old and young alike are constantly making, keeps 

 a heronry well advertised, much to the profit of the hawks. 



Standing motionless, with head drawn in between its shoul- 

 ders, as it waits at the margin of a pond at evening for the food 

 to come within striking range, the heron can scarcely be distin- 

 guished from a crooked stick. However deficient its sight may 

 be, especially by day, an extraordinary keenness of ear detects 

 the first creak of an intruder's foot, and with a quawk, quawk, 

 the bird rises and is off, trailing its legs behind, after the manner 

 of storks that Japanese artists have made so familiar. 



Have birds a color sense? A night heron that was seen 

 perching among the gray branches of a native beech tree must 

 have known how perfectly its coat blended with its surroundings, 

 where it was all but invisible to the passers by. 



168 



