A FEATHERED NOTABLE 99 
When I killed my heron, and by doing so 
probably saved it from a lingering death by starva- 
tion, it struck me as an odd coincidence that it 
was within a stone’s throw of the spot where a 
few weeks before I had saved another bird from a 
like fate—not in this instance by shooting it. The 
bird was the painted snipe, Rhynchaea semicollaris, 
a prettily coloured and mottled species with a 
green curved beak, and I found it on the low grassy 
margin of the stream with the point of its middle 
toe caught in one of Nature’s traps for the unwary 
—the closed shell of a large fresh-water clam. The 
stream at this spot was almost entirely overgrown 
with dense beds of bulrushes, and the clams were 
here so abundant that the bottom of the stream 
was covered with them. The snipe wading into 
the water a foot or so from the margin had set 
its middle toe inside a partially open shell, which 
had instantly closed and caught it. Only by 
severing the point off could the bird have delivered 
itself, but its soft beak was useless for such a 
purpose. It had succeeded in dragging the clam 
out, and on my approach it first tried to hide 
itself by crouching in the grass, and then struggled 
to drag itself away. It was, when I picked it up, 
a mere bundle of feathers and had probably been 
lying thus captive for three or four days in constant 
danger of being spied by a passing carrion-hawk 
and killed and eaten. But when I released the toe 
it managed to flutter up and go away to a distance 
of thirty or forty yards before it dropped down 
