78 BIRD STUDIES WITH A CAMERA 



the froglike monotone of the young is broken by 

 the sudden quawks of their parents. 



The rookery is in a low part of the woods which 

 evidently is flooded early in the year, a fact which 

 may have influenced the Herons in their selection 

 of the locality as a nesting site. At the time of 

 our visit the swamp maples, in which the nests are 

 placed, were densely undergrown with ferns, and 

 as we approached the whitened vegetation, which 

 clearly marked the limits of the rookery, a number 

 of Herons with squawks of alarm left the vicinity 

 of their nests, and soon the rookery was in an up- 

 roar. The common qnawk note was often heard, 

 but many of the calls were distinctly galline in 

 character and conveyed the imjjression that we had 

 invaded a henroost. 



The trees in which the nests were placed are very 

 tall and slender, mere poles some of them, with a 

 single nest where the branches fork ; while those 

 more heavily limbed had four, five,^' and even six of 

 the platforms of sticks, which with Herons serve as 

 nests, but in only a single instance was one nest 

 placed directly below another. A conservative count 

 yielded a total of five hundred and twenty-five nests, 

 all within a circle about one hundred yards in diam- 

 eter, nearly every suitable tree holding one or more, 

 the lowest being about thirty feet from the ground, 

 the highest at least eighty feet above it. 



While the limy deposits and j^artially digested 

 fish dropped by the birds seemed not to affect the 

 growth of the lower vegetation, it had a marked 

 influence on certain of the swamp maples, the devel- 

 opment of the trees which held a number of nests 



