95 DIVISION I. VERTEBRAL ANIMALS. —CLASS II. AVES. 
wading, the legs are very long, and the neck and bill proportionate. In 
most species the beak is very sharp pointed; the toes are generally elon- 
gated ; the hind toe is fairly applied to the ground. Though in general they 
build and breed in societies, they always wander alone ip search of food, 
and, after the breeding season, live apart. Many are adorned with elegant 
plumes and’ crests; their wings are ample; their flight buoyant. 
The picture which Wilson has drawn of the breeding-places of some of the 
American herons is worth quoting. The Great Heron, for example, builds « 
spacious platform of sticks covered with small twigs, on the top of a tall cedar, 
a community of ten or fifteen pairs usually building in company. “ Many of 
their breeding-places,” says Wilson, “occur in both Carolinas, chiefly in the 
vicinity of the sea. In the lower parts of New Jersey, they have also their 
favorite places for building and rearing their young. These are generally in 
the gloomy solitudes of the tallest cedar swamps, where, if unmolested, they 
continue annually to breed for many years. These swamps are from half a 
mile to a mile in breadth, and sometimes five or six in length, and appear as 
if they occupied the former channel of some choked-up river, stream, lake, 
or arm of the sea. The appearance they present to a stranger is singular: 
a front of tall and perfeetly straight trunks, rising to the height of fifty or 
sixty feet without a limb, and crowded in every direction, their tops so 
closely woven together as to shut out the day, spreading the gloom of a 
perpetual twilight below. On a nearer approach they are found to rise out 
of the water, which, from the impregnation of the fallen leaves and roots 
of the cedars, is of the color of brandy. Amid this bottom of congregated 
springs, the ruins of the former forest lie piled in every state of confusion. 
The roots, prostrate logs, and, in many places, the water, are covered with 
green mantling moss, while an undergrowth of laurel, fifteen or twenty feet 
high, intersects every opening so completely, as to render a passage through 
laborious and harassing beyond description: at every step you either sink to 
the knees, clamber over fallen timber, squeeze yourself through between the 
stubborn laurels, or plunge to the middle in ponds made by the uprooting 
of large trees, and which the moss concealed from observation. In calm 
weather the silence of death reigns in these dreary regions; a few inter- 
rupted rays of light shoot across the gloom; and, unless for the occasional 
hollow screams of the herons, and the melancholy chirping of one or two 
species of small birds, all is silence, solitude, and desolation. When a 
breeze rises, at first it sighs mournfully through the tops; but, as the gale 
increases, the tall, mast-like cedars wave like fishing-poles, and, rubbing 
against each other, produce a variety of singular noises, that, with the help 
of a little imagination, resemble shrieks, groans, or the 
erowling of beasts 
of prey.” 
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