THE HERON : A FEATHERED NOTABLE 101 



and the rooks hated the herons and mobbed them 

 and demohshed 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 pimia. 



