118 JOURNAIv AND PROCEEDINGS 



We hear frequent accounts of bevys of quail being 

 noticed both in barn and stackyards during winter, just near 

 its terminus. The almost snowless winter has been 

 propitious to the survival of these game birds of the cultivated 

 zones, and probably the pleasant voicings of "bob white" 

 will be a more frequent occurrence than has been the case for 

 four or five years past ; quail having been almost an unknown 

 quantity in these townships for some years. 



The welcome and solitude-loving Herons do not appear 

 here until the opening of navigation, and when the piping 

 of frogs in the waterways becomes audible. 



The Herons are being reduced to the "minimum" in 

 point of numbers, and seemed doomed, as far as these 

 districts are concerned, to the fate of the Wild Pigeon, once 

 so vastly multitudinous from time immemorial in these 

 regions. The last struggles were noticed by the present 

 writer about the year 1880. The conditions are so changed 

 since the fourties, by the removal of the Beechen Forests 

 principally, that the repatriation of the columbines seems out 

 of probability's range. 



Like the Wild Pigeons, the Herons of our species are so- 

 called socialistic birds (as also the Rooks of Europe) We can 

 visit, in the midst of a swamp solitude 2^ miles from here, a 

 precinct where an almost inappreciable remnant of the Heron 

 clans of former days lived and multiplied. A few tattered 

 remains of the Crane or nocturnal Heron's bushel basket-like 

 nests yet hang in ruins high up on the big forking sprays of 

 the Swamp Ash and Elm trees, as vestiges or archeological 

 relics of a by-gone time. Human residents near the border 

 of the yet swampy solitudes, express the belief that 

 the Cranes in two or three years from date may be only 

 a reminiscence in these localities. 



The Herons being long-legged waders, (as are the 

 Flamingoes) here find their security in nesting in lofty trees, 

 and they will also perch as sentinels, in the topmost branch 

 of lofty pines, to give a commanding outlook in wariness of 

 possible danger. The Bitterns, a seeming relative of the 



