THE HERON : 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 



