A FEATHERED NOTABLE 101 
and the rooks hated the herons and mobbed them 
and demolished their nests, and persecuted them 
in every rookish way; but they refused to quit, 
and at length the rooks, unable to tolerate them, — 
shifted their rookery a little farther away, and there 
was an uncomfortable sort of truce between the big 
black hostile birds and their grey ghostly neigh- 
bours with very long, sharp, and very unghostly 
beaks. 
On the occasion of my last visit this heronry 
was in the most interesting stage, when the young 
birds were fully grown and were to be seen standing 
up on their big nests or on the topmost branches of 
the trees waiting to be fed. At some spots in the 
wood where the trees stand well apart I could 
count as many as forty to fifty young birds standing 
in this way, in families of two, three, and four. It 
was a fine sight, and the noise they made at inter- 
vals was a fine thing to hear. The heron is a bird 
with a big voice. When nest-building is going on, 
and in fact until most of the eggs are laid, herons 
are noisy birds, and the sounds they emit are most 
curious—the loud familiar squalk or “frank,” 
which resembles the hard, powerful alarm-note of 
the peacock, but is more harsh, while other grinding 
metallic cries remind one of the carrion-crow. 
Other of their loud sounds are distinctly mammalian 
in character; there is a dog-like sound, partly bark 
and partly yelp, swine-like grunting, and other 
sounds which recall the peculiar, unhappy, desolate 
cries of the large felines, especially of the puma. 
