WATER-BIRD WAIFS 



has a prominent black stripe down each side of the 

 neck. This is the bird which makes the booming or 

 pumping noise out in the meadow or bog. In such 

 places it lives, never in woods, nor in colonies, unless 

 one can call a few pairs scattered over a big swamp 

 such. They nest with us, and each pair makes a rude 

 nest of stems on the wet ground in the bog, gener- 

 ally among reeds or rushes, sometimes grass, and 

 lays from four to six large deep olive brown eggs, 

 very different from the pale blue eggs of the other 

 herons. 



Like it in some respects in haunts and habits is its 

 relative, the Least Bittern, a tiny fellow that is much 

 like a rail in size and appearance, though its long neck 

 serves to distinguish it. It is yellowish in color, with 

 dark greenish back and crown. Its life is spent slipping 

 about amid the tangles of the bog, where it builds its 

 frail platform of a nest suspended between the reed 

 stems in a clump, usually three or four feet up. The 

 four or five eggs are bluish-white. 



Probably the best known and most generally dis- 

 tributed of our herons is the common Green Heron, or 

 Poke, a rather small, dark-colored species. Any 

 wood-bordered pond or wooded or bushy swamp is 

 liable to have from one to several pairs inhabiting it. 

 They live on small fish, frogs, lizards, and the like, 

 and nest in solitary fashion, either in some low ever- 

 green in the woods just up from the pond, or in a bush 

 out in the swamp. When one approaches the nest, 



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