BIRDS OF MINNESOTA. 93 
opposite sides are horizontal, but approximated in a verticle 
plane; they reach nearly to the tip of the tail, sometimes be- 
yond it; bill black, yellow at base, including the loral region 
and around the eye, as well as a larger basal portion of the 
lower mandible; legs black; lower part of tarsus behind and 
the toes yellow; color of plumage throughout pure white. 
Length, 24; wing, 10.20; tarsus, 3.80; bill, 3.15. 
Habitat, Temperate and Tropical America. 
ARDEA VIRESCENS L. (201.) 
GREEN HERON. 
A common summer resident, found along those of our inland 
streams which meander the meadows and the marshes with a 
sluggish current, after the 10th of April. It is seldom that an 
hour’s hunt along their rank grassy, reedy borders does not 
give one a sight of one or two of them. They commence 
building as early occasionally as the first of May in small com- 
munities, but usually about the 5th, a loose, bulky, flat nest of 
sticks, twigs and leaves, placed in the tops or branches of 
small trees in thickets. They lay about four pale-blue eggs, 
sometimes only three and sometimes five. They rear two 
broods usually. 
Their food embraces frogs, fishes, slugs, cray-fish, worms, 
&e., which they obtain abundantly enough to make them re- 
main in a single spot for hours when undisturbed, under which 
circumstances their maneuvers may be watched with a glass 
with great satisfaction, provided a position has been attained 
without the knowledge of the bird. This is no easy task, for 
their telescopic eyes take in every moving thing possible con- 
siderable distances away. More frequently one will find him 
standing in several inches of water, close to that which is still 
deeper, and as motionless as if he were grown there, with his 
head resting back upon his breast, and woe betide the reptile or 
fish that ventures within the radial possibilities of that neck 
and unerring bill. He never strikes by guess, and rarely with- 
out securing his victim, which is swallowed invariably head 
foremost, in the twinkling of an eye. He does not ordinarily 
thresh the ground with his game as the Greater Bittern often 
does, to reduce it to flexibility, or fractures, in order to swallow 
it, but selects the size best adapted to the capacities of his 
throat. When fishing for frogs specially his methods are 
somewhat modified. Instead of retaining his fixed attitude, 
which the frogs soon learn to recognize when their heads are 
