179 



THE OOLOGIST. 



obscured with dusky. The size is 

 about 7.00x11.00. Danby's Junco is 

 very common in Custer and other 

 towns in these Hills; it comes about the 

 houses as familiarly as the Chipping- 

 Sparrow. 



Nesting of the Great Blue Heron. 



Occasionally we hear of the nesting 

 of the Great Blue Heron through your 

 columns, but these notes are generally 

 not complete, and I have felt that extend- 

 ed observations might meet the require- 

 ments of your readers. 



My first acquaintance with the nest- 

 ing quarters of this species was on May 

 6th, about twenty years ago, when a 

 friend and myself visited a heronry in 

 Van Buren county, Mich., about 42° 20. 

 We failed to get any eggs as the nests 

 were all placed in immense sycamores, 

 all of the trees being as much as thirty 

 inches through and most of them con- 

 siderably more. It is not a small under- 

 taking to climb one of these smooth- 

 bark trees when it is quite fifty feet to 

 a limb. Moreover the nests are situ- 

 ated way out at the extremities of the 

 long smooth branches. I was some- 

 thicg of a climber myself in those days, 

 but I always blufted totally when I came 

 to a sycamore. My companion was al- 

 so scared, and although he had climbed 

 to two nests of the Red-shouldered 

 Hawk during the day he did not make 

 a move to ascend any of these trees. 



The locality was a deep swampy for- 

 est of elm, oak, basswood, etc., and 

 was often inundated. In fact we had a 

 difficult time in reaching the heronry, 

 and to gain our purpose had to take a 

 circuituous route. Not being able to 

 climb we resolved to make up in hard 

 work what we were lacking in head- 

 work and courage, so with the aid of a 

 man we chopped down two ot the gi- 

 gantic buttonwoods. This of course 

 was a very foolish act and besides gave 



us an infinite amount of work, which 

 was all for naught, as the nests were 

 destroyed and the eggs smashed when 

 the trees fell. But this simply shows 

 the disposition of two enthusiastic boys 

 who only half knew what they wanted. 



When we first entered the heronry 

 the birds, about one hundred pairs were 

 not wild, but on the first crack of a rifle 

 and the fall of one of their number 

 all was commotion. They continued to 

 cii'cle over our heads as long as we staid 

 and only occasionally a bird alighted 

 near enough to offer a good target. 

 Several birds were secured with a rifle, 

 but not a specimen with our shot guns. 



Generally not more than four nests 

 were built in a tree, but in two instan- 

 ces there were seven. Upwards of for- 

 ty nests of the year were counted in the 

 locality. I felt ashamed of our actions 

 before we left the grounds and I have 

 continued to feel badlv ever since we 

 needlessly chopped down those trees to 

 gratify a boyish whim. Some of the 

 young were quite three week's old. 



Tho next heronry that I visited was 

 some years later. I discovered this 

 bunch by watching the flight of the old 

 birds. There were fifteen nests in the 

 heronry and four nests were in one 

 tree. They were nearly all in syca- 

 mores, but a few were built on dead 

 branches of ash trees. We had no 

 climbers with us on this trip in Ottawa 

 Co., about 43 degrees, and probably 

 there was not one in our party who 

 could have used them if there had been 

 a collection. 



It was not till 1888 that I was grati- 

 fied with a sight of a collector up a big 

 sycamore after great blue's eggs. I had 

 actually begun to think that no one 

 could climb those largest sycamores and 

 I doubted if I should ever get a set of 

 the eggs for my collection in Michigan 

 as the birds nearly always built in big 

 sycamores. So when we heard of this 

 heronry in St. Joseph Co., Mich., just 

 a half mile from the Indiana state line. 



