1410 The Zoologist— October, 1868. 



taken on the purest bait), bits of whelk discarded for the same reason, 

 together with quantities of sea anemones, star-fish, &c, adherent to 

 the lines, a certain amount of entrails, the trimmings of skates and 

 rays, &c., makes a banquet for a number of herons. Any morning 

 I go clown I see five or six of these ogres making away, in the dim 

 dawn, from their horrid feast — their huge wings looming through the 

 gray darkness, phantom-like, in the air — their wild-sounding and 

 reiterated "pha-hank" — and the leavings of their repast, and the 

 ground around soiled by their foetid foeces — forcibly calls back one's 

 school-days and Virgil's harpies : — 



" With ordure still, unclean, 



Willi claws for hands, ami looks for ever lean: 

 ****** 



They snatch the meat, defiling all they find, 



And, parting, leave a loathsome steuch behind. 



****** 



With filthy claws their odious meal repeat, 



And mix their loathsome ordures with their meat." 



Herons in nature will eat other than live fish. I think the poor heron 

 a wrongly blamed bird in many respects. Many authors have calcu- 

 lated his depredations by the weight of fish he will eat when crammed 

 in confinement: surely this is not fair, for in nature he cannot, if he 

 would, eat to satiety ; for fish are quite as well endowed with instinct 

 as the heron, and I fear the poor fellow often feels this. I have 

 watched herons by the hour, through a glass, standing motionless 

 upon a lake's margin, or standing on one leg by a river, waiting as 

 patiently as any Isaac Walton for a nibble — have seen them miss 

 their stroke, too, as will the cleverest fly-fisher. I have walked 

 streams where the trout might be seen scudding under the banks in 

 abundance, and have shot herons patiently fishing in them, and yet 

 without a trout or fish in either gullet or stomach. In the spawning 

 season they are more destructive, the infatuation of spawning making 

 the trout quite reckless, and the shallow water giving the heron plenty 

 of time to catch them. I can offer no extenuating circumstance for 

 their destruction of frogs and brook-eels — perhaps no one will grudge 

 the "old crane" such fare. 



Missel Thrush. — The missel thrush sung, for the first time, on the 

 13th of December. 



Harry Blare-Knox. 



Dalley, September 7, 1868. 



