Watching the Bittern ' Pump ' 



BY BRADFORD TORREY 



INCE I printed, in 'The Auk' ( \'ol. vi, p. i ), a descrip- 

 tion of the Bittern's vocal performances, I have wit- 

 nessed a repetition of them on three occasions ; and the 

 story of m}' successes, such as they are, may be en- 

 couraging to the younger readers of Bird-Lore. 



The remarkable sounds, sometimes likened to those 

 of an old-fashioned wooden pump, sometimes to those 

 man driving a stake in wet soil (and the likeness is 

 unmistakable, not to say perfect, in both cases), must have attracted 

 attention, we may suppose, ever since the settlement of the countr\-. 

 The dullest person could not hear them, it would seem, without 

 wondering how and by what they were i)roduced. But up to the 

 time of my 'Auk' article, there was only one authentic record, so 

 far as I am aware, that the bird had ever been seen in the act of 

 uttering them. For my own part, having never lived near a meadow 

 adapted to the Bittern's purposes, I had never so much as heard his 

 famous 'boom,' though references to it here and there, in the writ- 

 ings of Thoreau especially, had given me a lively desire to do so. 

 It was a strange accident, surely, that the first Bittern I had ever 

 heard should show himself so openly and for so long a time. Be- 

 ginners' luck, we may call it, and be thankful that such providential 

 encouragements are not so very uncommon. As the Scripture says, 

 "The last shall be first." 



On the 2d of May. i88g, a year after the observations recorded 

 in 'The Auk' article, I was lying upon a cliff on the edge of a cat- 

 tail swamp, listening for Rail notes or a I^east Bittern's coo, when a 

 Bittern, very much to my surprise, pumped almost at my feet. By 

 good luck a small wooded peninsula jutted into the swamp just at 

 that point ( the swamp, I regret to say, has since been converted into 

 a town reservoir), and, keeping in the shelter of rocks and trees, 

 I stole out to its very tip unobserved. Two or three times the notes 

 were repeated, but I could get no sight of the performer. Then, all 

 in a flash, he stood before me — as no doubt he had been doing all 

 the while — in full view, just across a narrow space of open water 

 against a patch of cat-tails. He had taken no alarm, and pumped 

 si.x of eight times while I stood, opera-glass in hand, watching his 

 slightest motion. Then he stalked away into the reeds, pumped 

 twice, — behind the scenes, as it were, — and fell silent. 



Two days later I went to the W'ayland meadows, where I had 



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